At my last job, if you had unecessary changes for the work item (e.g. refactoring) you failed the code review.
But then we had 5% unit test coverage on a 5million+ LOC code base, they were terrified that refactoring (with no tests to back it up) might break things.
We were writing medical software and they were very risk adverse (obviously), so if i refactored a method I would have to raise that and would mean test cases would have to be written and manually run to ensure I hadn't broken anything.
So refactoring hardly happened (The code was an absolute mess), when i left they were working on a project to fix it but the timescales for it were 5 to 10 years.
But then we had 5% unit test coverage on a 5million+ LOC code base, they were terrified that refactoring (with no tests to back it up) might break things.
We were writing medical software and they were very risk adverse (obviously), so if i refactored a method I would have to raise that and would mean test cases would have to be written and manually run to ensure I hadn't broken anything.
So refactoring hardly happened (The code was an absolute mess), when i left they were working on a project to fix it but the timescales for it were 5 to 10 years.