As always, it depends on the context. Do you know why you were hired? You mentioned "10 devs, QA, BA" .. maybe a good chance to talk to everyone and write down

As always, it depends on the context. Do you know why you were hired? You mentioned "10 devs, QA, BA" .. maybe a good chance to talk to everyone and write down and later agree on a roles & responsibilities matrix. Same goes with process. Talk to everyone and find out what they actually do, write it down and then have an objective discussion if all this is still the best way of doing things / working together. As for the coding side of things: using cloc [1] and cpd [2] proved to be super helpful every single time for me. When talking to current devs you are likely to get a glimpse if what they worked on recently or will work on in the next few weeks. Cloc gives you the whole story from the beginning. Maybe it's a new stack -- but how come there are 1000s of lines of perl code in the repo? Always a joy to dig deeper and learn about the history. Cpd is a great helper to gauge what your devs actually do vs. what the say. In the heat of deadlines it is often the case that stuff just gets copy and pasted rather than refactored -- which will turn into a nightmare sooner or later. Bonus points for lots of copy/pasting in your test suites and automating cloc & cpd runs .. Also, if everyone is busy adding code/features, be the one who removes stuff that isn't needed anymore. On the learning side: you said you are not familiar with the stack. Are you sure your team is? This is a great opportunity to start a learning/ book reading activity for your team. Last but not least, always assume best intentions. A lot of things probably do not make sense anymore but they did in the past -- find out about the history and you'll earn the trust required to make an impact in the future. [1] http://cloc.sourceforge.net http://cloc.sourceforge.net and https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc [2] http://pmd.sourceforge.net/pmd-4.3.0/cpd.html http://pmd.sourceforge.net/pmd-4.3.0/cpd.html