Succeeding with agile refactoring strategies

Ongoing refactoring is important in an agile environment, so let’s talk about some ways of making sure code gets refactored regularly.

Dedicated work items for refactoring efforts

Remember that every line of code you and your team write should deliver business value, including your refactoring efforts.

Refactoring focuses on delivering value to the business by addressing known areas of technical risk and improving the speed the team can achieve in the future on related work in the targeted area.

Given these facts, it makes sense that refactoring efforts should be represented inside a sprint as user stories. Just as one developer might get a user story about integrating with a new external system for a partner, another developer might get a user story to refactor and establish additional tests around the data access layer.

In Chapter 15, we discussed tracking technical debt in a risk register. I didn’t make it...