They tend to make their changes as small surgical changes that affect the component as little as possible. And the more these surgical changes add up, the more fragile the code gets. As these changes build up, the code in the component starts to resemble a piece of conglomerate rock. The more people add onto the base, the more blobs of other rocks get added to the conglomerate. When I work on the code like this, it sometimes feels like I’m an archaeologist digging through the layers of an ancient city – if you pay really close attention, you can see which developers wrote which portions of the code. - Larry Osterman

At first glance, business software developers have little in common with Indiana Jones. But the emerging field of software archaeology applies some of the same skills, if not the dashing adventure. - Simon Sharwood

"Software archaeology" conjures up images of people poring over documents in a forgotten language, looking at broken artifacts whose purpose is unknown. - Ralph Johnson

It's been a long couple of days deep in the bit mines.