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Authors: Alexander Egyed
Large-scale
class diagrams are overwhelming to designers of software systems. They expose
the designer to a level of detail that is often inappropriate for basic
understanding; and they complicate evolutionary changes in that the broader
impact of changes becomes obscured by details. This chapter presents an
approach for the automated abstraction of class diagrams that allows
designers to “zoom out” on class diagrams to investigate and reason about
their bigger picture. The approach is based on a large number of abstraction
rules that individually are not very powerful but, when used together,
abstract complex class diagrams quickly. This chapter presents those
abstraction rules and an algorithm for applying them. The technique was
validated on over a dozen models where it was shown to be well-suited for
model understanding, consistency checking, and reverse engineering.
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