My business is change. I like to think we help people to change for the better and improve by introducing tools and techniques we think are good practice. To do this, we rely on our own research but we also encourage our customers to do their own research, too, and for the most part what they find backs up our suggestions for improvement. Imagine my surprise, then, when a customer recently sent me a link to some 'research' from a company billing itself as a 'Research Lab.' To give it even more credence, the company trumpeted its very own 'Chief Scientist' complete with PhD. The 'research' was pretty standard stuff, they'd done some static analysis on a bunch of systems from large companies and had found out pretty much what many of us already know - most computer systems aren't written very well and there is an awful lot of technical debt around. There are many reasons for this, which, again, many of us are aware of, so I won't bore you by ev