The freely available book "Reengineering Patterns" (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/) contains practical advice and shows systematic ways to tackle these situations froma variety of angles. Without knowing more details about your problem it is hard to recommend concrete steps, but _do_ read the book in any case.
2) favor process over results (whereas we Americans favor results over process)
While this may or may not be true on a case by case basis, it helps to understand that this is usually not done for its own sake. Results don't matter that much if you don't know how or why you achieved them, or if you cannot create them repeatably. I guess this ties into the "longer view" aspect.
I noticed an incredible increase in DenyHosts alerts over the last three days to the extent that I had to turn off alert emails. This picture says it all: http://stats.denyhosts.net/stats.html
If you're not only looking for tools but rather systematic approaches, then the book "Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns" http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/OORP/ is highly recommended, even for non-OO projects. Understanding code does not get you very far if you try to understand the wrong parts, in the wrong order, for the wrong purposes.
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The freely available book "Reengineering Patterns" (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/) contains practical advice and shows systematic ways to tackle these situations froma variety of angles. Without knowing more details about your problem it is hard to recommend concrete steps, but _do_ read the book in any case.
While this may or may not be true on a case by case basis, it helps to understand that this is usually not done for its own sake. Results don't matter that much if you don't know how or why you achieved them, or if you cannot create them repeatably. I guess this ties into the "longer view" aspect.
I noticed an incredible increase in DenyHosts alerts over the last three days to the extent that I had to turn off alert emails. This picture says it all: http://stats.denyhosts.net/stats.html
If you're not only looking for tools but rather systematic approaches, then the book "Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns" http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/OORP/ is highly recommended, even for non-OO projects. Understanding code does not get you very far if you try to understand the wrong parts, in the wrong order, for the wrong purposes.