Most of the time, software development involves understanding and changing old code more than writing completely new code. The first thing you need to do, then, is to learn about the area of the code you will be working with and to understand how it works. There are two approaches to this. The first approach is to try to locate the code and study it. The problem with this approach is that it can be hard to find the code in the first place and when you do, it's hard to determine the context. What objects are available to you? How are they configured? Can they help perform this new operation? The better approach is to look at the objects in a running system. You can usually run the program and locate the objects that are used in one part of the application. By inserting breakpoints, you can enter the debugger and look around. This usually gives you a much better view of what your environment looks like and makes it much easier to write the new code.
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