It also strongly depends on the type of tool you use. If by "static analysis" you mean "Clang screams at me if I'm juggling with razor blades", the results most

It also strongly depends on the type of tool you use. If by "static analysis" you mean "Clang screams at me if I'm juggling with razor blades", the results mostly seem to be rather useful. But I've yet to see one of those code-visualizing tools based on metrics that convinces me. The results I've seen so far are either obvious ("I already knew that, thanks") or inconclusive and hard to interpret. So, to me those tools seem to be more of a way to try and convince your manager that you should be given time for refactorings than actual utilities. I've been wondering if there could be a benefit in analyzing the commit history of a project instead so that one could somehow at least visualize obvious problem areas ("every third bugfix has to touch this piece of code, so we should really have a proper cleanup there...").