Automated abstraction of class diagrams

Designers can easily become overwhelmed with details when dealing with large class diagrams. This article presents an approach for automated abstraction 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, can abstract complex class structures quickly. This article 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.