Abstraction classes in software design

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Abstract

We distinguish three abstraction strata in software design statements: (i) Strategic design statements ('architectural design') determine global constraints, such as programming paradigms, architectural styles, component-based software enginering standards, design principles, and law-governed regularities; (ii) Tactical design statements ('detailed design') determine local constraints, such as design patterns, programming idioms, and refactorings; (iii) Implementation statements determine specific properties of the implementation, such as a class diagrams and program documentation. Seeking to ground this intuition in a well-defined vocabulary, we define two criteria of distinction in mathematical logic. We present the Intension/Locality hypothesis, postulating that the spectrum of software design statements is divided into three well-defined 'abstraction classes' as follows: (i) the class of non-local statements (N L) contains Strategic statements; (ii) the class of local and intensional statements (L I) contains Tactical statements; and (iii) the class of local and extensional statements (L E) contains Implementation statements. We demonstrate a broad range of software design statements that corroborate our hypothesis. We conclude with a proof of the architectural mismatch theorem, according to which architectural mismatch arises from attempting to combine components that assume conflicting non-local statements. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2006.

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Eden, A. H., Hirshfeld, Y., & Kazman, R. (2006). Abstraction classes in software design. IEE Proceedings: Software, 153(4), 163–182. https://doi.org/10.1049/ip-sen:20050075

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