Technique to master new (third party) projects [duplicate]

Question

This question already has answers here:

How do you dive into large code bases? (31 answers)

Closed 3 years ago.

I'm a graduated software developer.

In the last year I worked like a sysadmin, nowadays, I entered on a different software company as a VB.Net Developer, it means I need to learn and master a very, very huge solution (project) and... well, I don't know exactly where to start studying.

This solution involves a lot of company's-written libraries imported on a lot of common shared classes.

Summarizing, all I need to know is how to start involving me in this wide project. Correct me if the answer exist on other question, i didn't saw it

Thanks!

Answer 1

One of the best places to look is the tests. It sounds odd, but hear me out. Uncle Bob (Robert C Martin) mentions this when he makes his Clean Code videos (and I'm sure its in his book too). Good, well written test code is amazing documentation. You start going through it and you see how components should be used, how things fit together, and heck even what shouldn't be done.

And if this isn't available, go and write some tests. This is great because it allows you to use bits and pieces of code that you don't quite understand in a safe, isolated test environment.

Personally, this method has helped me understand code quickly, as I'm in the same boat as you.