My boss is gone and left me a CMS.

Application analysis

[Biggs]

Hello!

I've been working as an xhtml/asp front-end developer for a year now in a small company. My boss decided to leave and I'm basically taking over the web development department! Fantastic for me, but he left me with a somewhat buggy (yet stable) CMS which he built in classic asp with xml.

Now I need to analyze and (eventually) understand the full workings of this CMS so that I can support it and hopefully improve it in the future.

Do you have any recommendation of how to analyze an application which you didn't build? Any methods, tools or ideas you could think of?

Thanks!

[coopster]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Biggs.

I'm guessing he left behind 'all' the documentation too, right? Meaning there is none ;) I do not envy you. I have had the 'pleasure' more often than I care to admit. There is no magic solution, just hard work. Some tips that I have found useful over the years ...

1. Set yourself up with a standalone test environment so you can play with the existing code as a user without mucking up the LIVE stuff.
2. As a user, make notes of how things are working/flowing.
3. Get table definitions if the CMS is using a database and keep them handy.
4. Check the server configuration for any specifics that effect the operation.
5. Dig into the code, analyze, and add comments explaining what it is doing.

You might want to flowchart the overall and specific modules too. A quick visual comes in handy if you are drawn away from the project for any given amount of time. It will be useful to the 'next guy' too ;)

[Biggs]

Hard work it's gonna be indeed :( ...but I'll learn loads :)

Thank you very much Coopster.