Patent ID: 7426716

Claim:
A process for providing a run-time representation of specified characteristics of a previously developed object-oriented software program, the software program including a plurality of object classes and further including object related methods belonging to respective object classes, the process comprising: sensing at least one complex method call by examining the source code of the software program, a plurality of the methods being associated with each of the at least one complex method call, wherein the at least one complex method call includes at least one single method call; extracting the at least one single method call from each of the at least one complex method call, wherein the extracting comprises recursively replacing the at least one single method call with a phase variable; parsing the phase variable to resolve any polymorphic behavior associated with the extracted at least one single method call; generating a set of information for each of the methods from the at least one single method call, the information set for a particular method containing at least a name of the particular method and the run-time object class of the plurality of object classes to which the particular method belongs, wherein at least one of the object related methods in the software program is a polymorphic method and the run-time object class is determined based on the parsing of the phase variable; and constructing a representation of interactions between objects of the software program from the information contained in the method information sets.