How do you keep everything straight as you trace deeply into a piece of software through multiple method calls, object constructors, object factories, and even spring wiring. I find that 4 or 5 method calls are easy to keep in my head, but once you are going to 8 or 9 calls deep it gets hard to keep track of everything. Are there strategies for keeping everything straight?

In particular, I might be looking for how to do task x, but then as I trace down (or up) I lose track of that goal, or I find multiple layers need changes, but then I lose track of which changes as I trace all the way down. Or I have tentative plans that I find out are not valid but then during the tracing I forget that the plan is invalid and try to consider the same plan all over again killing time....

Is there software that might be able to help out? grep and even eclipse can help me to do the actual tracing from a call to the definition but I'm more worried about keeping track of everything including the de-facto plan for what has to change (which might vary as you go down/up and realize the prior plan was poor).

In the past I have dealt with a few big methods that you trace and pretty much can figure out what is going on within a few calls. But now there are dozens of really tiny methods, many just a single call to another method/constructor and it is hard to keep track of them all.