Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP

Chapter 6. Elevate the Level of Abstraction

Complexity is a central issue in software development. Elevating the level of abstraction helps reduce complexity and the amount of documentation required by the project, while facilitating communication. You can achieve this elevation through reuse, the use of high-level modeling tools, refactoring, and stabilizing the architecture early.

One effective approach for reducing complexity is to reuse existing assets, such as reusable components, legacy systems, existing business processes, patterns, or open source software. Two great examples of reuse that have had a major impact on the software industry ...