[cratermoon]

OK, but that's not the question I asked. What I want to know is how we can make refactoring as much a non-negotiable part of the process as code review, tests, CI/CD, or whatever you consider essential, non-skippable, even under a short timeframe?

[woooooo]

In the context they were in, the answer to all of those questions is "shut the fuck up, we can talk about it later".

In the normal course of business, it's a different conversation. Even then, if you're making some poor dev refactor a bunch of code because they had the misfortune to touch it, maybe you should have done the work yourself a long time ago. Or written a linter and ticketed owners.

You don't want to make feature development some sort of pain lottery.

[cratermoon]

Am I reading you right, that you consider refactoring "pain"?

[woooooo]

Unplanned work being arbitrarily scoped into sprint is pain. Doesn't matter the source.

In practice, your approach often turns into "junior engineer abuse" where they have to clean up a bunch of unrelated pre-existing stuff to make the seniors happy as a condition of shipping their feature.