Testing/Understanding Code

[ogsirus]

Hi Guys,

Really need your help. I have started a new job, my first developing job in fact and Im struggling to understand how the system works. Thier product is massive and far more complex than anything i've seen. I have been looking at it during my first week to figure out how it all works but am making little progress. Theres alot of scripts and legacy code but I believe my first tasks will be going through the code of commenting it to show what it is doing. Just curious if anyone has a good way of testing code to see what it does or can point me in the right direction.

Cheers.

[ddanbe]

May the source be with you!
IMHO this is a very hard task of trying to document code of someone else.
Make use of any comments you find in the code.
Are there still paper documents availabable who discribe what the system is doing or suposed to do?
Cannot give any more advise I'm affraid.
Success!

[ogsirus]

There are a few, mainly outdated or for a end-user rather than a programmer. The few comments in the code are terrible to be honest.

[cgeier]

How many lines of code? Did you overstate your abilities during your interview? You may find it beneficial to shadow one (or more) of the users of the product--to get the end user experience. Aside from that, if you want to prove yourself, you will likely need to spend time at work as well as personal time to figure it all out.

[ogsirus]

Lines - too many, spread over 400-500 classes. Yep they know my ability with the initial test they gave. Yep I had a crash course of the product to get the end user experience. I've been playing around with it myself since then. I agree with you, Ive question the other developers if there is something I should brush up on to get a better understanding of the product but the response i get is no because off how big it is.

So far im just debugging and looking at the call stack to see where everything is linked. Would unit testing help?

[ddanbe]

If you're on a unix system, you could use the wc -l command to count the lines in all the files.

[ogsirus]

I wrote a program to count how many classes there were.... just shy of 16000. As for lines, well the average is around 320 per class. So the way i went about it was to start off with one component(which im still one) and dive deep into how works. speaking to the other developers, they've said theres parts of the program they havent even touched so its make me feel better that im not the only one.