As I see it, the auditor's job is to analyse the system thoroughly, not to skim some areas of it. Looking through 5000 pages worth of code on a computer screen

As I see it, the auditor's job is to analyse the system thoroughly, not to skim some areas of it. Looking through 5000 pages worth of code on a computer screen would also be quite a challenge, even with the interactive aids you get from an IDE. Tangent: speaking from personal experience, sifting through an existing foreign code base is a really exciting task for some people, figuring out what makes it tick and how the pieces fit together can be fun. Granted, I was reverse-engineering a closed-source product, not reading its actual source, but that was even more fun :D Come to think of it, the tool I used for that, IDA Pro, has some interesting features that IDEs don't, such as graphical representations of function call graphs [1] and function basic blocks [2]. It would be interesting to see what a creative person could do by integrating those into a regular IDE. [1] http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Reverse_Engineering_Mentoring_Lesson_005 http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Reverse_Engineering_Mentori... [2] https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/tech/graphing.shtml https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/tech/graphing.shtml