Agile, like waterfall, is only as good as it’s implementers. At my workplace we had lots of lingering bugs because the entire project had been poorly architected. We pushed to refactor and our scrum masters looked at us like we were crazy.
Putting patches in bugs fits in a 2 week cycle, taking months to do something right, does not.
Programmers having to beg glorified administrative assistants for permission to refactor code is why I’m inches from quitting this agile coaching bit to do a startup or something.
I can teach people XP, Kanban, or scrum but I can’t teach them common sense.
If you want to start a startup so you can have clean code constantly refactored, you will join many others shocked that customers don’t care (not directly, and pretty much never at startup stage). In the mean time, someone else with the idea moves quicker and has all your customers.
The end (literally).
At a (much) later stage, there will be times to refactor. Carefully, and with limited scope that shows real value.
Putting patches in bugs fits in a 2 week cycle, taking months to do something right, does not.