A method and system of a method of tracing a data element for flow analysis includes receiving an input of a data element to be traced, tagging the data element to be traced and selecting one or more tiers of an application to trace the flow of the tagged data element. The selected one or more tiers of the application are parsed through a plugin associated with a software programming language and an entry is recorded at the plugin associated with a software programming language, when an instance of traced data element is encountered. A database entry is created for every encounter of the tagged data element. Further, a data flow graph is generated to trace the data element across the at least one application tier.