Scientific Toolworks Understand is a software tool for understanding and analyzing code. It is often used by software developers and programmers to understand large and complex code bases. Understand provides many features to help visualize, manipulate, and analyze source code written in various programming languages.

OVERVIEW OF SCIENTIFIC TOOLWORKS UNDERSTAND

Scientific Toolworks Understand is a comprehensive set of software tools designed to provide software developers and programmers with a comprehensive understanding of complex code. As a code understanding and analysis tool, Understand offers many powerful features that improve code understanding, improve maintainability, and facilitate an efficient development process.

Root is ideal for providing a deep understanding of code structure, dependencies, and relationships within a project. Developers can use its cross-referencing capabilities to move seamlessly between their code and track connections between variables, functions, and classes. The software supports a variety of programming languages, including C, C++, Java, and Python, making it suitable for use in various development environments.

One of the standout features of Understand is its graphical visualization tool for visualizing code structure. It not only helps to understand complex relationships but also improves the ability to analyze and optimize code architecture. The software goes beyond basic code understanding by providing numerous metrics and statistics. Enables developers to assess code complexity, size, and dependencies to make informed decisions about code quality and potential improvements.

To understand the importance of efficient navigation in large codebases, Understand includes powerful search and navigation tools. Developers can quickly find specific code elements, making exploration of complex projects more manageable. The tool also supports integration with popular integrated development environments (IDEs), seamlessly embedding its analytics capabilities into developer workflows.

FEATURES OF SCIENTIFIC TOOLWORKS UNDERSTAND

STATIC CODE ANALYSIS

Scientific Toolworks excels at static code analysis, allowing developers to identify potential issues, measure code quality, and gain deep insight into large code libraries with millions of lines in over 30 languages, including C/C++, Java, Python, and Ada. It calculates critical metrics such as cyclomatic complexity, code line-to-comment ratio, dead code detection, method weight, inheritance state, and dependency graph, and displays them through intuitive heatmaps, graphs, and tables to quickly visualize the health and stability of your code. This feature supports compliance checks with MISRA, AUTOSAR, and other standards, making it ideal for safety-critical projects such as those used by NASA and the US Navy, while AI-powered summarization highlights issues and suggests improvements to speed up updates and refactorings.

EXTENSIVE REFERENCES AND CALL TREES

Cross-references and call trees provide granular navigation through code, showing where functions, variables, and classes are defined, called, or modified, increasing productivity for troubleshooting and understanding complex relationships. Developers can create call graphs, control flow diagrams, data flow views, and butterfly diagrams, with customizable styles, unique chart plug-ins, and export options for team collaboration. The information browser dynamically updates with object details such as return types, parameters, inputs, and references, allowing you to jump directly to code examples for efficient editing and analysis.

DEPENDENCY GRAPHING AND VISUALIZATION

Visualize the dependencies of modules, classes, functions, and custom architectures through interactive graphs, helping you make refactoring decisions, optimize, and organize your code base for larger projects. Features like heat metrics color-code functions by complexity level and provide a high-level overview, while UML class views, execution path diagrams, and code-to-code flowcharts enhance understanding of program structure and flow. New customizations allow users to drag nodes, preview AI summaries with a click, and adjust the layout of the graph.​

EDITING AND REFACTORING TOOLS

As a full IDE, Understand supports live code editing, automated refactoring, find-and-replace operations, and synchronized comments, requirements, and documentation markup across code sections. It integrates seamlessly with VS Code through extensions for fast analysis, flow chart monitoring, and compliance checking, and is a virtual debugger that allows you to step through execution scenarios without running code. Powerful search by entity type, metric, description, or identifier ensures fast location and change in large projects.​

AUTOMATIC AND EXTENSIBLE

Python and Perl APIs facilitate custom reporting, plugin development, CI/CD automation, and specialized tools with an extensive library of user-submitted plugins for graphs, metrics, architecture, and reports. Eclipse integration, high-speed search through millions of lines, and IDE toolbars for viewing metrics, sources, and graphs simplify workflows. Compatible with Windows 7+ and macOS 10.10+, it makes it easy to understand legacy code, onboard new engineers, and perform standard validation.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• Supported OS: Windows 11/10/8.1/7
• Memory (RAM): 1 GB of RAM or more is required
• Hard Disk Space: 300 MB or more required