Study The Source Witha Debugger

The act of acquiring knowledge about third-party libraries and frameworks by tracing the execution of the program in a symbolic debugger or other interactive run-time environment. Brings the code and design to life in ways that simply reading the source can never achieve. Helpful to have a goal in mind while doing this activity, like figuring out why your incremental evolution to the library/framework is not working.

See Also: UseTheSourceLuke, ExperimentStudyRefine, or for an alternate viewpoint, ForgetTheDebugger

Yes, but if you must do this, it kinda' says something about the quality of the product's documentation, and how (un)readable the source is, doesn't it?

No. it says something about the complexity of the requirements and the extent of refactoring. Sure, it's easy to read flat procedural functions (if not too much invention of home-built objects is going on), and you really don't have to because they're easy to document. But an object-oriented framework is another matter. Understanding these without a debugger is like understanding a video tape without a VCR. :-)

What do you mean by "understanding?" I can use lots of things without having to understand very much about them. I would worry more about the code you write than the code you use.

No to you, too. "There is no substitute for understanding." Unfortunately, the debugger doesn't provide understanding, it only gives clues. Careful thinking about what actually happened (for the examples we followed in the debugger) will eventually lead to understanding, but is much more difficult without the source. And, in any case, the debugger always shows you exactly what the code did, not what it was supposed to do. The source code (which is not always available, by the way) is often much more informative about the intent. StevePowell

Seems to me that this would not work so well for code with lots of delegation going on (jumping all over the place). I just recently had this technique recommended to me, but I haven't tried it yet, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

EditText of this page (last edited December 16, 2002)
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