d Abstraction of Class Diagrams ALEXANDER EGYED Teknowledge Corporation Designers can easily become overwhelmed with details when dealing with large class diagrams. icle 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 mber of abstraction rules that individually are not very powerful, but when used together, ract 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. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.2.2 [Software Engineering]: Design Tools and Techniques General Terms: Design al Key Words and Phrases: Class abstraction, class diagrams, class patterns, reverse engineering, transformation, unified modeling language