Programming for the consultant/Approaching A New Code Base

• Start with the acceptance tests to understand the features
• Checkout the build file. Run the build to check the health of it
• Sketch class diagrams (or reverse engineer from code)
• Look at the main domain objects and what they do
• Take a vertical slice. Select a main feature and see how it works from the front to back end.
• Look at the source code repository, specifically at files that have changed the most. Checkout the log messages as well