An abstract operation involves the selection, or abstracting, of common features of objects and procedures. Data is packaged together along with the operations that act on it in a way that the data can then be manipulated only through the operations and not directly. This strategy can reduce the complexity of the software code and aid in preventing a programmer from changing, deliberately or inadvertently, a program code.

An abstract operation is a technique that can hide information. Encapsulation, which combines two elements to create a new one, is another information hiding technique. A computer programmer would utilize the information hiding ability of an abstract operation, for example, to combine two functions that perform almost the same task into one function. The use of abstract operations in these and other procedures are of fundamental importance in software engineering--the development of large software applications. Reduced complexity and the ability to tie together related functions make software development less onerous.

Data abstraction is at the heart of object-oriented programming languages such as C++ and XML (Extensible Markup Language). By reducing the complexity of the programming language and the performance of tasks, abstract operations provide the user with more time to devote to the task at hand, rather than in programming the computer to operate.