The best way to familiarize yourself with an inherited codebase

Question

Stacker Nobody asked about the most shocking thing new programmers find as they enter the field.

Very high on the list, is the impact of inheriting a codebase with which

Answer 1

One thing vi and emacs users can do is use tags. Tags are contained in a file ( usually called TAGS ). You generate one or more tags files by a command ( etags for emacs vtags for vi ). Then we you edit source code and you see a confusing function or variable you load the tags file and it will take you to where the function is declared ( not perfect by good enough ). I've actually written some macros that let you navigate source using Alt-cursor, sort of like popd and pushd in many flavors of UNIX.

BubbaT

Answer 2

Try to understand the business logic behind the code. Once you know why the code was written in the first place and what it is supposed to do, you can start reading through it, or as someone said, prolly fixing a few bugs here and there