TL;DR
Treating refactoring as standalone backlog stories is usually ineffective and hard to justify to stakeholders. Instead, incrementally clean the code as you implement each feature to get faster, more sustainable improvements.
What happened
The piece outlines a common development arc: a codebase starts out tidy, but small compromises accumulate as teams hurry to deliver features. These compromises—often labeled "technical debt"—create tangled areas of code that slow future work. Teams frequently consider asking product owners for dedicated time to refactor, but such large, one-off cleanup efforts are difficult to sell and typically yield limited return after a long delay. The recommended alternative is to refactor continuously: when building the next feature, carve a clean path through the problematic code you must touch, leaving untouched areas alone. This localized cleanup may slightly extend the immediate task but often pays off quickly, sometimes within the same sprint, and reduces the need for disruptive, large-scale rewrites. Over time, these repeated small investments restore and maintain code quality while keeping feature delivery flowing.
Why it matters
- Dedicated, large refactorings are hard to justify to product ownership and risk delayed benefits.
- Incremental cleanup provides near-term gains and reduces wasted effort on parts of the codebase you won't touch.
- Refactoring in-flow helps preserve development velocity and yields compound benefits as cleaned areas are reused.
- Small, continuous improvements are less disruptive and more likely to deliver measurable value quickly.
Key facts
- Codebases often begin clean but degrade as quick delivery decisions accumulate.
- The author argues the term "technical debt" often masks simply poor code that grows thickets of complications.
- Teams typically detour around messy code rather than fixing it, which slows future work.
- Asking for a block of time to do a wholesale refactor is usually unsuccessful with product owners.
- Large refactoring sessions, if approved, tend to return less benefit and incur a long delay before payoff.
- The recommended approach is to clean only the code paths you work on while building new features.
- Incremental refactoring can produce benefits within the same sprint and accelerate subsequent work.
- Repeated, focused cleanup reduces future obstacles and improves overall delivery.
What to watch next
- Whether product owners are willing to allocate dedicated time for large refactors—often they are not.
- Whether small, in-flow refactorings begin to yield faster delivery for subsequent features (sometimes visible within the same sprint).
- Whether teams continue to detour around problematic code instead of cleaning paths as they work.
Quick glossary
- Refactoring: Making internal code changes to improve structure or readability without altering external behavior.
- Backlog: A prioritized list of work items or stories that a development team plans to complete.
- Technical debt: A metaphor describing the increased future cost of quick or suboptimal development choices; often used to explain degraded code quality.
- Sprint: A fixed-length iteration in agile development during which a team completes selected backlog items.
- Feature: A functional change or addition delivered to users, typically represented by one or more backlog items.
Reader FAQ
Should refactoring be added to the product backlog as separate stories?
The source argues this is usually an inferior approach and difficult to get approved by product owners.
What is the recommended way to handle necessary refactoring?
Refactor incrementally: clean the code paths touched while implementing new features rather than scheduling wholesale rewrites.
Will incremental refactoring slow down feature delivery?
It may add a small amount of time to individual features, but often the cleanup immediately helps and speeds subsequent work.
Is a big refactor ever effective?
The source suggests big refactors are hard to sell and tend to return less than expected after a long delay.
There has recently been a lot of noise on the lists, and questions at conferences, about putting refactoring "stories" on the backlog. Even if "technical debt" has grown up, this…
Sources
- Refactoring – Not on the backlog (2014)
- Before you create your next “refactoring story”, read this
- Code cleanup / refactoring / touching code not related to …
- Where should code refactoring and optimization fit within …
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