When we are talking about subclassing or inheriting, the building is usually built from the bottom up. Subclasses inherit the basis and then provide more. However, it could be useful to reverse the structure sometimes as well.

Consider Strategy Pattern which defines the outline of a process and has interchangeable algorithms as strategies. If we apply this structure under the hierarchy of classes, we will have Template Method Pattern.

A template method is an abstract method (optionally with default implementation) and acts as a placeholder under the outline of a larger process. Subclasses override or implement related methods to modify or complete the behaviors. Imaging the skeleton of a TextReader, we are expecting its subclasses to handle text files from different storage media, detect different encodings and read all the text. We may consider a structure like this:

The TextReader in this example has a method readAllText that reads all text from a resource by two...