ion in Programming --- working definition by John N. Shutt Computer Science Technical Report Series WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE Computer Science Department 100 Institute Road, Worcester, Massachusetts 01609-2280 Abstraction in Programming --- working definition John N. Shutt jshutt@cs.wpi.edu Computer Science Department Worcester Polytechnic Institute Worcester, MA 01609 December 1999 Abstract This paper investigates the nature of the process in programming by which a new level of abstraction is constructed by building upon an existing one. The process is called abstraction. The purpose of the investigation is to provide an informal characterization of abstraction, as a conceptual foundation for subsequent development of a mathematical theory of abstraction. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Other senses of `abstraction' 1 2.1 Metaphysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2.1.1 Universals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Understanding the behaviour of distributed applications is a very challenging task, due to the complexity of these applications. To manage complexity, the top-down use of suitable abstraction hierarchies is frequently proposed. Given the complexity of distributed applications, manually deriving such abstraction hierarchies is not realistic. This paper discusses one tool that groups more primitive events into abstract events to derive a hierarchy of abstract events automatically. Ideally, these abstractions should reveal logical units of an application and their relations. To explore the abstraction hierarchies visualizations. A user can navigate through these abstraction hierarchies, displaying an execution at various levels of abstraction. Examples of such abstract visualizations are given and discussed. In general, the abstractions derived automatically represent meaningful parts of the application: they can be interpreted using terms of the application domain. While the abstraction tool not necessarily derives the best possible abstraction hierarchies in all cases, it does the bulk of work and provides good initial abstractions.