How to deal with very complex codebase?

Question

I recently changed my job to a big MNC and the code I am exposed to is highly complicated, difficult to read and understand. Although it is divided in microservices and runs on local I have to keep running it on local step by step and many times the methods are tediously long and not just abstract with bunch of hacks around. I really hate pinging people many times to ask for clarifications to make changes to it. Solving a bug once took me 2 days. There are only 3 main APIs but they are very deep and nested and there are areas of code which only other devs know about.

How do we deal with such things as a developer? Really appreciate if anyone can share their thoughts on the same.

If you can run locally and step through the code, you have most of what you need. Some things simply take time. And patience. — Ccm, Dec 10 '23 at 18:53
What you're asking is essentially how a significant percentage (if not outright majority) of us do our jobs. This is way too broad to be meaningfully answerable. — Flater, Dec 11 '23 at 04:00
OP just boasts and wants extra praise from strangers. My last bug took tree working weeks to fix. It was in a somewhat familiar average complexity codebase within a single service. — Basilevs, Dec 11 '23 at 19:42

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 10 '23 at 13:13

Get people to talk to you.

I would suggest several iterations of:

Spend time identifying several places you do not understand.
Call those who do in a short, precise meeting where they explain what is going on.
Write your understandings up as documentation afterwards.
Have them review your understandings.

You will probably need to spend quite a lot of time understanding this software before confidently be able to fix bugs in it.

How to deal with very complex codebase?

1 Answers1