Success with legacy code relies on only making changes to code you understand. Here are 9 systematic approaches that will help you UNDERSTAND your legacy code.
Author: Ken Nelson
A Toolsmith’s Guide to the Understand API
Using Understand’s C, Perl, and Python APIs to write programs about your programs, you can make your team more productive, smarter, and less dangerous
Short-term memory overload while debugging
The decisions you make while thinking about code are far too complicated to trust to memory. Ken shows how Understand helps you not rely on short term memory and walk code in an organized fashion that misses nothing.
2 Uber Fast Ways to Browse Your Code
In this short video, Ken shows you two similar but crucially different fast ways to browse code in Understand.
Info is just a Hover Away
If you hover over your code in Understand it will tell you all sorts of things about what you are hovering over.
One-Click Code Browsing
The “Browse” mode of Understand generates synch events and definition visits with just a single click.
Hyper-Xref in Understand
If you want to make smarter, safer, and testable changes you need to know exactly where what you are changing will affect. Hyper-Xref technology, and the GUI and API/DevOps tools in Understand make you a safer, smarter engineer less likely to add bugs as you change code.
Help your future self… write code not “magic”
Using unexplained numbers makes your code hard to understand, and difficult to adapt and extend. Static analysis tools like Understand can find them, but take care fixing them.
Why swing just one hammer…oops IDE?
Humans didn’t stop needing special tools when they started editing code. Your time and brain are special – use the right tool for the job.
Precise Searching for Smarter Changes
Using precise cross-references from static analysis tools like Understand tells you exactly where to look both for direct implications of what you are about to change and also, importantly, for subsequent impacts or side-effects of those changes