Comment by Tainnor
14 days ago
The thing that both of your goals have in common is that they require software which is architected and not just an interconnected mess of everything calling everything else.
If you do have such a mess, you can't really get a good visual overview (it's approaching a complete graph), and you also can't get prose documentation of code components because there are no clear responsibilities.
Well, I agree that better architecture is useful, but I don't think it's required by my "digging into what's going on starting from an entry point" process. I do think trying to write the prose documentation I described tends to drive better architecture. Trying to write the documentation on a module of spaghetti often what helps me realize there is no through line to why all this stuff is in this module.