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Software Archaeology for Beginners

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Software Archaeology for Beginners
FOSDEM 2014

Most open source projects are rightly proud of their communities, long histories (both measured in time and version control), passionate debates and occasional trolling. Newcomers to these communities often face an uphill battle, though. Not just in understanding decision making processes and community standards, but in coming to terms with often complex, contradictory, and poorly documented code bases. This talk will introduce you to the concepts and tools you need to be an expert code, culture, and community archaeologist and quickly become productive and knowledgeable in an unknown or legacy code base.

This talk will introduce you to the concepts and tools you need to be an expert code, culture and community archaeologist and quickly become productive and knowledgeable in an unknown or legacy code base and will cover:

  • Navigating culture
  • Understanding open source communities and how to become part of one
  • Spelunking legacy code bases
  • Reverse documentation
  • Tests, testing, and statistics
  • Modeling, profiling, and tracing
  • Avoiding curses, rolling boulders, and snakes

You'll learn how to navigate code, community, and culture in open source projects and learn skills that are useful in any legacy code base.

Speakers: James Turnbull