Techniques to read code written by others?

Posted by Simon on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Simon
Published on 2011-03-12T08:34:24Z Indexed on 2011/03/12 16:17 UTC
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best-practices

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code

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legacy

Are there any techniques that you find useful or follow when it comes to reading and understanding code written by others when Direct Knowledge Transfer/meeting the person who wrote the code is not an option.

One of the techniques that I follow when dealing with legacy code is by adding additional debugging statements and based on the values I figure out the flow/logic.

This can be tedious at times. Hence the reason behind this question, Are there any other techniques being widely practiced or that you personally follow when it comes to dealing with code written by other people/colleagues/open-source team?

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