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AI-powered code understanding built on the deep cross-reference analysis of SciTools Understand. Onboard helps developers quickly understand unfamiliar codebases, making it faster and easier to onboard new engineers and navigate complex systems.
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One winter, Kristina received a letter slipped under the stage door before a show. No return address. Inside, a single line: “We saw you keep the teacup.” She recognized the handwriting from the postcard two years before and felt an odd kinship with whoever had written it. That night she did a piece about keeping things — a quiet set where she carried three cups across the stage and held them as if they contained the world. Midway, the smallest cup toppled; its chime was a tiny, honest sound. The audience didn’t gasp. They laughed and began to clap as if to help. After the show, people lined up not for autographs but to leave small objects at her feet: a button, a pressed bloom, a travel card.
As the gestures accumulated, Kristina realized her name — DD39s Kristina Melba — had become less an identity and more a mailbox. People poured into her shows carrying shards of themselves: short notes, confessions, small tokens. She began keeping them, cataloguing them like the archivist she’d once been. Each item sparked a new performance; each performance stitched the audience a little closer. dd39s kristina melba aka kristina melba kristi top
Her most talked-about piece, “Top,” was one she’d first performed under the name Kristi Top. It began in darkness: a single overhead light fell on a stool. Kristina, in a simple pale dress, climbed slowly, as if mounting the world. She balanced a stack of plates on her head — not an obvious circus trick, but delicate and exacting. As the set went on, she added stories under each plate, reading anonymous notes left by audience members over months. The final act was to lift each plate and set it aside, revealing the fragile handwriting beneath. When she reached the last plate, the handwritten note read simply: “I kept my mother’s laugh.” Kristina smiled, and the room exhaled. The applause that night lasted long enough to feel like approval, not just appreciation. One winter, Kristina received a letter slipped under
Her shows were small rituals held in converted warehouses and late-night cafes. She dressed in fabrics that caught stage light like ocean spray — copper, pearlescent cream, the exact blush of melon — and she moved with choreography that suggested stories rather than told them. One number had no words at all, only an old record playing and Kristina arranging discarded objects into impossible balances: a teacup perched on a spoon, a photograph suspended by a single hair. The audience leaned forward as if they could help keep the objects from falling; applause came like relief when they didn’t. That night she did a piece about keeping
Kristina Melba learned to move through the world like sunrise: slow at first, then impossible to ignore. She grew up in a small coastal town where every morning the sea rehearsed its light, and Kristina rehearsed her own ways of standing out — not by yelling, but by refining the quiet things: a steady glance, a precise step, the exact tilt of a smile.
Outside, the sea rehearsed its light the way it always had. Inside each chosen object, a new person began their own small ritual. Kristina Melba continued to move, to keep, to release — as intentional and inevitable as sunrise.
Our new AI tool provides detailed analysis and explanations of your code, highlighting potential issues and suggesting improvements. It simplifies complex code structures, making it easier for you to grasp the logic and flow of your programs.
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Our virtual debugger lets you step through code, offering a clear view of execution stages. It's essential for trying out different scenarios and edge cases.
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New customization options enable you to personalize your graphs. Click graph nodes to get a preview and AI summary of the code, or drag to move and shape the graph.
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Ensure every commit is safe. Bug Hunter will notify and walk you through each step to fix the bug.
Dangling Pointer
Division by Zero
Memory Leak
Null Pointer Dereference
Stack Address Escape
Undefined Call
Unintialized Value
Virtual Call
Bug Hunter will run in the background while you work and can be setup as part of your CI/CD pipeline so every commit can be bug free.
See the bug highlighted directly in your code, with a detailed explanation for each part.
Bug Hunter will show you step by step how the bug can be recreated.
Understand assists you with every code writing task, whether you are an industry veteran or just getting started on a new team
Does your project require strict coding standards? Check your code against common, standards.
Quickly see the difference between two project states. View changes by files, folders, entities or architectures.
VIsualize your code with Control Flow, Call Trees, Dependency, Butterfly, UML Class, and more.
Receive detailed metrics about your code at the file, class, and entity levels.
Our API allows the creation of custom graphs, metrics, and lexical analysis. Integrating with your current tools is easy!
Cross reference technology makes you a safer, smarter engineer less likely to add bugs as you change code.
New members to your team can hit the ground running faster than ever with our code comprehension tools.
Understand confusing legacy code easily with our dependency analysis, cross references, and call trees.
Understand has been Spotlighted by the U.S. Navy's SBIR Transition Program
Understand helps hundreds of companies and government organizations, including the U.S. Navy, stay code compliant with our CodeCheck tool.
"NSWCDD needed a tool to ensure that their projects worked correctly and to ensure that the coding complied with the Navy Strategic Systems Program (SSP) coding standard. As an established tool that was reliable but also dynamic, flexible, and customizable, Understand piqued their interest."
-Navy SBIR Transition Program Spotlight
The Understand extension for VS Code makes our most used features even more accessible. Find the underlying types for variables, view control flow graphs, utilize thousands of code compliance checks, and perform a full analysis of your project in a fraction of the time compared to similiar extensions.
Go To DownloadHave you recently inherited confusing legacy code? Understand is here to help.
Blindly changing legacy code can lead to disaster. Know what your changes will affect before you even start writing.
Navigating legacy code doesn't need to feel like an endless maze. Quickly navigate references to create a mental map of the code base.
Expand a function's call tree to see what any changes might affect. You can also view Butterfly, Control Flow, and many other useful graphs.
Does your project require strict coding standards? Understand has the capability to check your code against industry, common, or custom standards.
CodeCheck can be integrated into your CI/CD pipeline to run with every code check-in and notify team members when a compliance check has failed.
All rules come standard with every installation of Understand.
Quickly see the difference between two project states. View changes by files, folders, entities or architectures. View your changes as a text comparison or in a tree map. Just specify the git revision you would like to compare against or compare two databases.
Quickly see how your source code is structured, organized, and related. See Control Flow, Call Trees, Dependency, Butterfly, UML Class, and many other graph types. All our graphs are interactive and customizable, expand or contract your graph to see exactly what you need.
Do you need help locating the "problem" areas in your code? Understand comes bundled with dozens of metrics that help with exactly this scenario.
Do you prefer complete control over your coding environment? Understand comes bundled with a robust API to unlock your project's full potential.
Our API allows the creation of custom graphs, metrics, and lexical analysis. Integrating with your current tools is now easier than ever! Learn More
Verify code compliance, ensure code complexity stays below a specified threshold, or email the team a code comparison graph all from your existing pipeline. Learn More
Create and enforce any custom coding standard. We can teach you how to write a standard or simply hire us to handle the entire process for you! Learn More
1def fileCleanText(file):
2 returnString = "";
3
4 # Open the file lexer with macros expanded and
5 # inactive code removed
6 for lexeme in file.lexer(False,8,False,True):
7 if(lexeme.token() != "Comment"):
8 # Go through lexemes in the file and append
9 # the text of non-comments to returnText
10 returnString += lexeme.text();
11 return returnString;
12
13# Search for the first file named ‘test’ and print
14# the file name and the cleaned text
15file = db.lookup(".test.","file")[0];
16print (file.longname());
17print(fileCleanText(file));Navigating complex code relationships has never been easier. Hyper-Xref technology and the tools in Understand make you a safer, smarter engineer less likely to add bugs as you change code.
Understand contains a built in IDE that facilitates code browsing. Click on any entity (function, class, variable, etc) to see detailed information and double click to be taken directly to where the entity is defined. Every named part of your code is referenced and can be bi-directionaly navigated.
Keep the Information Browser pinned while you work to quickly see everything Understand knows about a selected entity. The Information Browser updates depending on what you have selected.
For functions, see the return type, paramters, and a list of references that take you to that instance immediately when clicked.
For files, see the member variables and functions, a list of includes, and relevant metrics.
Graphs can also be accessed from the Information Browser or by right clicking any named entity in your code. Quickly see everything that calls or is called by a specific funtion with a Butterfly Graph.
Give your new engineers the tools they need to succeed. Understand helps onboard new engineers rapidly and safely.
“What would have previously taken me several days (or weeks) can now be accomplished in a matter of hours… It’s the Swiss army knife of static analysis tools.”
“[Understand] is good for discovering the structure of the code dependencies and call-paths... it would have taken me hours to generate the same thing on my own.”
Aerospace
“Understand accelerates my understanding of large source code repositories.”
One winter, Kristina received a letter slipped under the stage door before a show. No return address. Inside, a single line: “We saw you keep the teacup.” She recognized the handwriting from the postcard two years before and felt an odd kinship with whoever had written it. That night she did a piece about keeping things — a quiet set where she carried three cups across the stage and held them as if they contained the world. Midway, the smallest cup toppled; its chime was a tiny, honest sound. The audience didn’t gasp. They laughed and began to clap as if to help. After the show, people lined up not for autographs but to leave small objects at her feet: a button, a pressed bloom, a travel card.
As the gestures accumulated, Kristina realized her name — DD39s Kristina Melba — had become less an identity and more a mailbox. People poured into her shows carrying shards of themselves: short notes, confessions, small tokens. She began keeping them, cataloguing them like the archivist she’d once been. Each item sparked a new performance; each performance stitched the audience a little closer.
Her most talked-about piece, “Top,” was one she’d first performed under the name Kristi Top. It began in darkness: a single overhead light fell on a stool. Kristina, in a simple pale dress, climbed slowly, as if mounting the world. She balanced a stack of plates on her head — not an obvious circus trick, but delicate and exacting. As the set went on, she added stories under each plate, reading anonymous notes left by audience members over months. The final act was to lift each plate and set it aside, revealing the fragile handwriting beneath. When she reached the last plate, the handwritten note read simply: “I kept my mother’s laugh.” Kristina smiled, and the room exhaled. The applause that night lasted long enough to feel like approval, not just appreciation.
Her shows were small rituals held in converted warehouses and late-night cafes. She dressed in fabrics that caught stage light like ocean spray — copper, pearlescent cream, the exact blush of melon — and she moved with choreography that suggested stories rather than told them. One number had no words at all, only an old record playing and Kristina arranging discarded objects into impossible balances: a teacup perched on a spoon, a photograph suspended by a single hair. The audience leaned forward as if they could help keep the objects from falling; applause came like relief when they didn’t.
Kristina Melba learned to move through the world like sunrise: slow at first, then impossible to ignore. She grew up in a small coastal town where every morning the sea rehearsed its light, and Kristina rehearsed her own ways of standing out — not by yelling, but by refining the quiet things: a steady glance, a precise step, the exact tilt of a smile.
Outside, the sea rehearsed its light the way it always had. Inside each chosen object, a new person began their own small ritual. Kristina Melba continued to move, to keep, to release — as intentional and inevitable as sunrise.
Understand by Scitools is certified for use as a support tool for all projects requiring ISO 26262, IEC 61508, and EN 50128 compliance. Safety is our top priority at Scitools, our software is heavily tested and vetted before each release providing your team with a safe and secure development environment.
We asked our users to send us pictures of their Understand setups, here are some of the submissions. Check out the full blog article
Chris Rhodes, Senior Software Engineer
Dell Inc.
