Do you want to better understand your codebase? Using Understand's Graphs feature is a great way to explore your project. Understand offers a variety of graphs including dependency, control flow, call graphs, and more.
Graphs are a visual representation of your code. Seeing your project visually helps you better understand relationships within your code, identify patterns and errors, and share your work with others.
The most popular graphs in Understand include Call and Called by, Butterfly, Object References, Control Flow, UML Class Diagram, UML Sequence Diagram, Data Flow, Dependency, and Declaration.
Graph variants allow you to quickly change the content and style of a graph. For example, to group functions by file or architecture, use a cluster graph variant (shown below). The relationship variant of a call graph will show all the paths between two functions. The compare variant highlights changes between your current project and a previous version of your project. Specific graphs have even more variants to explore.
Choose from a variety of options in the submenu to interact with your code in helpful and interesting ways. For example, there are a variety of node options to select from in the customizer toolbar and/or legends.
Graphs can be saved as JPEG, PNG, or SVG files. Share your graphs digitally, or print a physical copy of your work to share with others. We not only let you create cool graphs, but you can also edit and customize them with the Visio (vdx, vsdx) and Graphviz (dot) exports.
“What would have previously taken me several days (or weeks) can now be accomplished in a matter of hours… It’s the Swiss army knife of static analysis tools.”
“[Understand] is good for discovering the structure of the code dependencies and call-paths... it would have taken me hours to generate the same thing on my own.”
“Understand accelerates my understanding of large source code repositories.”
“[Understand] has great graphing tools, metrics, reporting, data dictionary… and is customizable and extensible. It also helps you to find compile time and parsing errors.”
– USAF Software Developer
“Understand can take existing code and basically generate any design information or view you would want to see, in addition to performing several useful types of analyses.”
– Jason Bold, Sr. Software Eng.
“Understand is a tremendous reverse engineering tool... with excellent metrics reporting and evolving standards verification capability.”
– Pratt & Whitney Software Developer
“Understand™ is good for discovering the structure of the code dependencies and call-paths... it would have taken me hours to generate the same thing on my own, and I would not have had near as much confidence in my own work (assurance that I understood the code correctly).”
– Paul Hyland, Software Engineer, Lockheed Martin
