This post is more toward the techie end of the scale, non-geeks can skip this one :)
I took on a software porting project in my first job, and this is how I dealt with getting to grips with the large, unknown codebase. I hope this is of use to anyone – particularly junior developers – in learning a large inherited codebase for software project inherited from another developer.
Link: Programming: Dealing with Inherited Source Code
I’m cross-linking here on WebsiteDoctor as it might be useful to web programmers starting work on a large unfamiliar codebase.
Good article. Can you recommend any tool to help with navigation of large code bases?
Hi MK,
There’s some good recommendations over on StackOverflow here that might be of use – many of them are C specific.
Personally, I think you can’t go wrong with some basic text processing and search tools. It’s fairly platform dependent, so I like Notepad2 (the Kai Liu version) for text editing, along with Agent Ransack for in-file search. On UNIX systems gvim, grep and a terminal are usually all I’d need.
HTH.
Alastair.