dr_jeff wrote: snip
But checking out someone else's code is a real bitch. Several times I was given someone else's code to use as a starting point for a similar program. I usually ended up throwing it away and doing my own from scratch because I was convinced it would take less time.
Reverse engineering is never easier than forward engineering. It depends too on how well project management enforces documentation rules/guidelines.
Even so, one problem is that once you understand someone else's code well enough, you can get trapped into thinking like them, and overlook that surprise condition that the original coder overlooked :-(