> wouldn't ask the manager to approve every small refactoring
It becomes an issue if it takes more than a day. Scrum, Kanban, RUP, XP, waterfall - whatever "methodology" they say they're following, it boils down to "tell me how long this is going to take and I'll check to see how close what you said was to the time it took". If you can make a change in an hour, sure. If it takes a day, it's going to break your "commitment".
Except in XP the developer will refactor before and after implementing the feature, the customer doesn’t get to say how things get done, and there is no “manager” role.
Not to say that people don’t operate completely differently and call it XP. That’s always a problem. But it isn’t “No True Scotsman”, it’s literally just not following the recipe and expecting the cake at the end.
Or... Management could choose not run their software development organisation with the kind of micromanagement strategy that requires everything to be allocated in units of one day or less. It's another red flag that has become disturbingly common in the industry and suggests managers more interested in "visibility" and "metrics" than actually doing a good job, sustainably, by trusting their technical people to do theirs.
I love how "story points" aren't supposed to represent days, yet conveniently everyone winds up with 10-ish over their 2 week sprint, and it is totally micromanaged. Meanwhile none of the non-technical "product people" are ever asked to account for their time like this.
It becomes an issue if it takes more than a day. Scrum, Kanban, RUP, XP, waterfall - whatever "methodology" they say they're following, it boils down to "tell me how long this is going to take and I'll check to see how close what you said was to the time it took". If you can make a change in an hour, sure. If it takes a day, it's going to break your "commitment".