Lately I’ve been working on some projects written by other developers. I thought it would be useful to quickly summarize some techniques I use to get familiar with a code base I did not write or wrote a long time ago.

For this example I'm going to use source from the facebook three20 project http://github.com/facebook/three20 simply because it is popular and easily available.

Some of the techniques I use include:

1) Xcode Class Model

The first technique is to get an interactive class diagram using Xcode’s quick model feature under the Design > Class Model > Quick Model menu.

Xcode Shortcuts is great document by Colin Wheeler (Cocoa Samurai).