Overcoming barriers to refactoring

When I speak with developers in the technical community, almost everyone has stories of being told that they were not allowed to spend time refactoring their code.

Sometimes this mandate came from upper management and sometimes from product management or someone involved in the agile process. However, just as often, the directive would come from engineering leadership such as a team lead or engineering manager.

The reasons for this can vary by the organization and project you’re working on, but some common reasons include the following:

• There’s an urgent deadline and the team must focus on meeting it
• Refactoring the code isn’t perceived to provide any business value
• The change would be to a risky area of the application with a lot of technical debt and there’s a risk of introducing bugs
• Developers are told “Don’t worry about the quality of the code; this is just a prototype and won...