Applying Meyer's taxonomy to object-oriented software systems

Inheritance is one of the core concepts in object-orientation. There has been much discussion and disagreement as to the correct uses of the inheritance mechanism in the literature. The classification of B. Meyer (1996) seems to be the most comprehensive for the identification of appropriate uses of inheritance. While it seems that this taxonomy has been validated by its author, in the design and development of software, it does not seem to have been validated against existing systems. We attempt, in the first instance, to move towards this validation by attempting to define a method whereby the inheritance relationships in software systems can be classified into individual categories in Meyer's taxonomy. Subsequently it also provides some insight on how inheritance is used in such systems.