Design extraction by adiabatic multi-perspective abstraction

Design extraction of an unfamiliar system is a complex cognitive task. This paper presents an approach that can help human expert in exploring a large and complex code information space of unfamiliar software. It provides her/him a platform to access the code information with flexible, fine and delicate control over volume and composition of the accessed information sub-space. The proposed approach integrates two forms of abstraction. First, it helps one to comprehend complexity of the code information space by allowing the explorer to investigate the system from numerous (combinatorial) coherent perspectives. In the second level, it helps one to overcome scale of the information space by allowing the explorer to compress or expand any composition of its sub-spaces. This new approach, called the adiabatic multi-perspective (AMP) approach to program abstraction, is founded on a symmetrical dual hierarchical (SDH) organization of code information space and a novel formalism for abstract dependency analysis (ADA), which is also one of the first formalisms to perform complete program dependency analysis on abstract program models