Abstraction classes in software design

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 engineering 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 class diagrams and program documentation. Seeking to ground the distinction between Strategic, Tactical, and Implementation statements in a well-defined vocabulary, we define 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 (a_) contains Strategic statements; (ii) The class of local and intensional statements (_\) contains Tactical statements; (iii) The class of ‘local and extensional ’ statements (_X) contains Implementatio