Increasingly IT organizations ask us how they can improve quality while still developing at speed. Their problem is that after years of responding quickly to the business, they are now unable to keep pace and find themselves mired in a swamp of inscrutable, unmaintainable and buggy code. As a result, response to the business is grinding to a halt. Such organizations have built up a toxic amount of what is termed technical debt.

In this report we look at Static Analysis, an old technology in IT engineering terms, which is rising dramatically in popularity. It is riding on the tide of industry trends such as outsourcing, application security and ALM. It fits well with Agile processes. It can play an important role in repaying technical debt and restoring IT responsiveness to business needs.