Abstract: The environment is based on a computer system, comprising a target and a host, including a debugger, capable of issuing commands to obtain information on the target. The host further has a server, capable of communicating with the target, generally through a target agent, to access target condition data concerning target objects. The server has a server module for elaborating, maintaining and giving access to an object-oriented tree representation of the target objects. The target condition data are attributes of the target objects, each of which also has available operations and methods. A survey tool interface is capable of answering at least some of the debugger commands with information derived from said tree representation. The commands are converted into available operations.