Re: how is data arrived at in this table/column?

There is no shortcut, whether looking at a 20 year-old batch-based
system or a brand new system that was just deployed yesterday. As long
as the midrange market continues to treat documentation as the ugly wart
on the backside of software, brute force research is the only way to
extract business rules / knowledge from the code it is embedded within.

To be clear, the documentation story is deplorable for almost any
software on any platform.

And unfortunately, even when some effort has been put into
documentation, you really can't be sure it matches the code unless you
dig into the code as well as the documentation. Indeed, some portion
of the "how is this value calculated?" questions actually come from
already having consulted and understood the documentation. I.e. the
question is "why isn't the code behaving as the documentation says it
should?".

So all this is just to triple-underscore the beginning and end of
Buck's response. I think it would be just as accurate to say:

"There is no shortcut, whether looking at a 20 year-old batch-based
system or a brand new system that was just deployed yesterday. Brute
force research is the only way to extract business rules / knowledge
from the code it is embedded within."

Those tools other people were discussing can help in that process, but
ultimately it comes down to reading and understanding the code.

John Y.