An Inheritance Flow Model for Class Hierarchy Analysis

This paper presents an inheritanceJow model, which represents the inheritance relationships among classes as a flow graph. A flow operation is associated with each attribute and method in a class to denote the defined (redefined) or inherited member. An inherited member can be deemed as being handled by a sequence of flow operations along a path in the flow graph. This model provides several analyses in a class hierarchy, such as implicit inherited member and polymorphic method invocation. These analyses may be applied in various fields of software engineering, such as static analysis, maintenance, and complexity measurement.