Sextant enables you to visually navigate through a software project and to explore all standard relations available in IDEs, such as e.g., the inheritance hierarchy or the call graph. Additionally, it is possible to explore relationships between different kinds of artifacts, that is, with Sextant it is possible to navigate from code to some configuration file(s) or XML deployment descriptors and back. To make a concrete example, given an Enterprise Java Bean it is possible to navigate to all methods with a specifc transaction attribute. In the background Sextant automatically anaylzes the XML deployment descriptor as well as the classes to determine the result.

Additionally, since it is impossible for us to foresee all queries a user might want to execute, Sextant is user-extensible. Users can directly use a pre-defined parameterized query or can easily extend an existing query. Additionally, it is also possible to specify new queries that are added to the context menu.

Furthermore, in Sextant all explorations are visualized in one view to enable the user to get the big picture and to enable a navigation through your software project without getting lost, i.e., the navigation path is implicitly recorded in the graph and is always visible. In Sextant a graph is used to represent the results of your exploration to be able to show you the relations between elements which were previously explored and the elements that are currently explored. Imagine the following situation, let's assume we have already explored two methods and now execute a query to get all fields that are accessed by the first method. After that, we execute the same query for the second method. Assuming that both methods access the same field this relation will immediately become apparent in the graph; both methods pinpoint to the same field.