At the beginning of July, we released Understand 2.0. It represented the culmination of about 3 years of work where we maintained and improved Understand 1.4 while simultaneously developing a brand new version of Understand.

Our goal for 2.0 was to make a tool that is a “must-have” if you are maintaining code (and who isn’t??). 

Understand 2.0 has a totally re-written GUI with modern GUI conveniences. It enhances our leading capabilities in code understanding/maintenance with new features like the “Entity Explorer” and vast improvements to our existing ways of telling you about your code.

You can now analyze any language we support together using “combined language analysis”. If Java calls C and then C calls Ada, Understand 2.0 can follow the chain.

It has a much-improved programmers editor with code completion, macros, foldable structure bars, and dozens of other improvements. 

Understand 2.0 also introduces key new capabilities not available in any other tool. Things like Architecture, continuous change knowledge, semantic change analysis, a nifty overlayed differencing tool,  automatic metrics charting/graphing, and maintenance estimation.

We are very proud of Understand 2.0. All of our engineers use it all day every day. New hires tell us “I don’t know how I programmed without it”. 

Finally, we would like to thank the thousands of Understand users that sent suggestions over the years. We take your ideas very seriously. Understand 2.0 is built to do what you asked us to have it do.  Also, many thanks go out to the few hundred users who participated in our 2.0 beta program, using sometimes flakey builds but always giving us gentle and excellent guidance. 

It’s been a long and hard three years, but I’m confident Understand 2.0  sets us up for another successful decade helping engineers maintain their code.

Regards,

Ken Nelson
President
Scientiific Toolworks, Inc.