Codebase Onboarding Overview

When we think about 'onboarding' most people think that it's just for new hires but turns out that we are constantly onboarding and trying to understand new code.

We onboard to new code when we:

1. Have new hires

2. A dev that is switching or merging teams

3. Trying to understand a new part of the codebase or a legacy application

4. When devs about to leave (maybe voluntarily or involuntarily 😔)

5. When there's a system outage

6. You need to dive into code and have no support

7. You are trying to understand open source code or a 3rd party dependency

8. Code was written by people that are long gone

9. Company acquisition

Today, when we find ourselves in these situations, the only way to progress is to read the code line by line and build a mental model of how the code works in our heads which can take a lot of time, particularly in a company's codebase or a large open source project.

CodeSee provides an automatic, up to date visual of your code and the connections between so that you can glean that mental model instantly as a starting point.

But visuals aren't just helpful as a single point in time. CodeSee provides visuals throughout your development workflow making onboarding seamless and more productive than ever.

Use Review Maps so whenever you make a code change, you can visualize how your code change impacts the rest of the codebase ie. if you made that change, what else is connected to it. Review Maps are like having an architect sitting next to you, telling you what's under the hood. This speeds up your onboarding.

Download our VSCode extension to get review maps right in your editor.