> The perils of Agile. You are only allowed to do what you stakeholders understand. The rest is ignored.
Sounds like quite a passive aggressive way to solve a communication problem. "You only said we needed feature X, you didn't tell us not to mess up our codebase during the process".
It's not the stakeholders responsibility to tell you how to do your job. You don't wear clothes at work because it's in the backlog, you do it because it would be unprofessional not to.
Even when stakeholders have asked me to take shortcuts, they usually seem very level-headed about it once you start the dialog.
I've talked to stakeholders proactively about tradeoffs of taking shortcuts and they seem to understand when I compare "not refactoring" with "making a mess". In my experience, people understand what messes are.
If we make a mess, it will slow us down as long as it is there. We can clean it up later, too, but it will cost us more because it is slowing us for a longer time.
Taking shortcuts without telling stakeholders is unprofessional. If the stakeholders don't explicitly tell you to not refactor, refactoring is implied.
Of course they want it as fast as possible. But they also want the code to not slow the team down later on. And they want a cure for cancer, eternal happiness and world peace too.
My point is that people say and want all kinds of things, but when you engage in dialog about tradeoffs, they usually understand what refactoring is and how it affects long-term development speed.
Sounds like quite a passive aggressive way to solve a communication problem. "You only said we needed feature X, you didn't tell us not to mess up our codebase during the process".
It's not the stakeholders responsibility to tell you how to do your job. You don't wear clothes at work because it's in the backlog, you do it because it would be unprofessional not to.
Even when stakeholders have asked me to take shortcuts, they usually seem very level-headed about it once you start the dialog.
I've talked to stakeholders proactively about tradeoffs of taking shortcuts and they seem to understand when I compare "not refactoring" with "making a mess". In my experience, people understand what messes are.
If we make a mess, it will slow us down as long as it is there. We can clean it up later, too, but it will cost us more because it is slowing us for a longer time.
Taking shortcuts without telling stakeholders is unprofessional. If the stakeholders don't explicitly tell you to not refactor, refactoring is implied.