This thread has lots of good advice. I'll add some of mine, not limited to C/C++. If you have luxury of using VCS, make a full use of its value. Many teams only

This thread has lots of good advice. I'll add some of mine, not limited to C/C++. If you have luxury of using VCS, make a full use of its value. Many teams only use it as a tool merely for collaboration. VCS can be more than that. Pull the history then build a simple database. It doesn't have to be an RDB (it's helpful though); a simple JSON file or even a spreadsheet file is a good starter. There are so many valuable information to be fetched with just a simple data driven approach, almost immediately. * You can find out the most relevant files/functions for your upcoming works. If some functions/files have been frequently changed, then it's going to be the hot spot for your works. Focus on them to improve your quality of life. If you want to introduce unit tests? Then focus on the hot spot. Suffer from lots of merge conflicts? The same. * You can also figure out correlation among the project and its source files. Some seemingly distant files are frequently changed together? Those might suggest an implicit structure that not might be clear from the code itself. This kind of information from external contexts can be useful to understand the bird's eye view. * Real ownership models of each module can be inferred from the history. Having a clear ownership model helps, especially if you want to introduce some form of code review. If some code/data/module seems to have unclear ownership? That might be a signal for refactoring needs. * Specific to C/C++ contexts, build time improvements could be focused on important modules, in a data driven way. Incremental build time matters a lot. Break down frequently changed modules rather than blindly removing dependencies on random files. You can even combine this with header dependency to score the module with the real build time impact. There could be so many other things if you can integrate other development tools with VCS. In the era of LLM, I guess we can even try to feed the project history and metadata to the model and ask for some interesting insights, though I haven't tried this. It might need some dedicated model engineering if we want to do this without a huge context window but my guts tell that this should be something worth try.