Refactoring -- Not on the backlog!

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 is invariably an inferior idea. Here's why:

When our project begins, the code is clean. The field is well-mowed, life is good, the world's our oyster. Everything is going to be just fine.

We can build features smoothly and easily, though we always seem to take a few little twists and turns. Things look pretty clean, and besides, we're in a hurry. We don't notice anything going wrong and we press on rapidly.

However, we're letting some brush build up in our nearly perfect field of code. Sometimes people call this "technical debt". It really isn't: it's really just not very good code. But it doesn't look too bad -- yet.

Inevitably, this slows us down a bit. In order to keep going rapidly, we are even less careful than before, and soon more weedy thickets have grown up.

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