How do you familiarize with a codebase that has no documentation? [closed]

Question

I don't know, I've been told that the previous developers did fine in picking up and heading straight into coding with no major problem. I wonder if I am doing it wrong by requesting my manager for some brief meetings with some senior programmers here. Is it better to be cautious and finish this time sensitive tracker the long way, or rush it to meat the deadline?

Just on the side note, the previous programmers who maintain this app are all gone after less than a year in the company. Don't know if there's any relation in anything.

Answer 1

There was a thread about this on Slashdot a year ago. Amidst the usual Slashdot cruft, there are some good answers; maybe someone can extract them here.

Some good ones are stepping through the program with a debugger, Doxygen (of course) (and related tools like ctags/etags/GNU Global), giving up, and a couple of books about exactly this topic: Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers and Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective by Diomidis Spinellis.

And I personally recommend reading The P.G. Wodehouse Method Of Refactoring; if nothing it's at least a fun read!

Answer 2

Read the unit tests. No unit tests? Write some unit tests.