Chicken and the Egg... (aka. Read vs. Writing code)

So I have been asked to deliver training for a group of people on how to “read” source code. I guess I should frame this request a bit. With very large product such as Exchange there are millions of lines of code and no one knows everything about what is happening in source. Most developers are very focused on the pieces of the puzzle they own. As part of the Escalation Team for Exchange we have to “reverse engineer on the fly” so-to-speak to understand and develop steps towards resolving customer issues. This typically involves jumping quickly from one code base to another depending upon where the investigation takes us... A large portion of our time is spent simply reading source code, not writing it.

So how do you teach people this “art” of digging deep very quickly into unfamilar code that you had no hand in writing? I myself, I come from a very traditional process of learning how to code.. by sitting down and writing it. I am struggling with how to tailor a delivery to focus on reading vs. writing source code. To me the only way you can be truely efficient in this process is by having written code yourself.

Thoughts?

 

==== Update ====

Great comments...
So boy do I agree about good comments, but to me comments are really geared towards explaining a particular block of code at the implementation detail level. But how does one know where to begin looking for that particular block of code? I think this stems from great engineering documentation about the object model itself and how things related from a high level. 

I guess to ellaborate more on my intention and its really to help individuals without a lot of understanding of C/C++/C# begin to understand how things fit together and how they can begin using source code to determine what to look for that is wrong in the customer enviornment. To me if you are attempting to read source with sparse comments, then you need to have some practicle understanding of the language itself.