My apologies if this is a well worn subject, I am pretty ignorant of terminology.
Frequently I am handed basically abandoned Access apps at work and asked to fix, document, migrate, whatever. These are generally very complex layered apps that are years and years old, have gone through 1/2 dozen revisions, teams, corporate BS etc. By the time I get them they are a tangle of clumsy queries, incoherant VBA and run like Jake Clampetts truck. And no, there is no documentation. Never, none.
Are there best practices to analyzing and becoming facile with an unfamiliar application? My method to now has could best be described as hunt and peck, I document the structures, pull all the queries using VBA querydef properties and parameters, connections, etc,. I step through the code to get the logic,but that is slow going and not efficient. I know how to grab all the elements but and have successfully done this stuff but want to find a better,more efficient way and was wondering if anyone has pointers. I have not done much with 3rs party tools necause they seem to just do what I have already done with VBA.
I am also unfamiliar with the terminology -- "analyze" is kind of vague, "learn" doesn't seem right, reverse engineer isn't accurate but seems more correct.
Thnks!!!