[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Technical debt is something that 'business users' don't need to or want to care about.

Sometimes it's hard to tell your manager: Yes I know you want to track every single coding task in Jira, and you don't see any immediate value to this one, and I'm not going to dispute that, but I am going to do it and you "don't need to or want to care about it".

Sucks not to have that autonomy but it's real. That's when you have to justify the refactor, and not with potentially offensive statements like above.

[ziml77]

It's also important that they know, so no one is surprised when the next release goes out with those changes and it turns out that an edge case wasn't tested. You don't want to have to explain that something broke because you made a decision on your own to clean up the code.

When you're getting permission to do something like that, management is deciding if the risk/reward tradeoff is worth it, and I think it's only fair to give them the opportunity to make that analysis.

[throwaway6532]

That's why you sneak it in piecemeal as you go, and leverage the critical path of urgent things that aren't finished yet to get it done.