> It gives clues, but it doesn't tell the whole story. It certainly isn't enough to do anything other than make a pure guess at what the application actually does and more importantly how it does it.
I'm not claiming that it will tell the whole story; I am claiming that it tells so much more of the story than the code, that you may as well just not look at the code if you have the data structures.
OTOH, if you look at only the code and not the data structures, you'll have so little of the story that you cannot make any change without risk of breaking some other piece of logic.
There's just no comparison between "The code tells us what the applications should do" and "The data tells us what the applications should do".
If you can find any examples where it is faster to determine what business logic is supported by the application by examining code (as opposed to being faster to determine what business logic is supported by examining the data structures), I'd very much like to see that.
I'm not claiming that it will tell the whole story; I am claiming that it tells so much more of the story than the code, that you may as well just not look at the code if you have the data structures.
OTOH, if you look at only the code and not the data structures, you'll have so little of the story that you cannot make any change without risk of breaking some other piece of logic.
There's just no comparison between "The code tells us what the applications should do" and "The data tells us what the applications should do".
If you can find any examples where it is faster to determine what business logic is supported by the application by examining code (as opposed to being faster to determine what business logic is supported by examining the data structures), I'd very much like to see that.