Code understanding, reverse engineering, best concepts and tools. Java

Question

One of most demanding tasks for any programmer, architect is understanding other\'s code.

For example, I am contractor, hired to rescue some project very quickly. F

Answer 1

By far the most important tools are your ears, your tongue and your larynx. Ask the people who are familiar with the code - they'll be able to help you understand its general architecture much better than any software tools.

Automatically reverse-engineered complete UML models are generally nearly useless because they cannot distinguish between important abstractions and implementation details - which is the whole point of such models.

Software tools are more useful to answer very specific questions when you are investigating details, such as "where is this method called from?" or "what classes implement this interface" - any good IDE will be able to do that. Debuggers can help too - placing breakpoints at keypoints of the code and looking at the call stack when they're hit is often very enlightening.