When to inherit and when not to

In object-oriented software development, it is generally accepted that inheritance should be used just to model a generalization/specialization relationship (i.e. an IS-A relation). This analysis/design guideline is too permissive. Some researchers thus advocate that a subclass should inherit the full a behavior of its superclass. Behavior inheritance, however, is far too restricted. In this paper, we establish a formal model that can clearly differentiate IS-A from behavior inheritance. Under this model, IS-A and behavior inheritance can be decomposed into more fundamental concepts: subsets and abstraction/concretization. Also, we are able to develop a set of refined guidelines regarding the use of inheritance