[varispeed]

I was once in such a position. I persuaded management to first cover the entire project with extensive test suite before touching anything. It took us around 3 months to have "good" coverage and then we started refactor of parts that were 100% covered. 5 months in the shareholders got impatient and demanded "results". We were not ready yet and in their mind we were doing nothing. No amount of explanation helped and they thought we are just adding superficial work ("the project worked before and we were shipping new features! Maybe you are just not skilled enough?") Eventually they decided to scrap whole thing. Project was killed and entire team sacked.

[jimbokun]

I’m a developer and if a team spent five months only refactoring with zero features added I would fire you too.

Refactoring and quality improvements must happen incrementally and in parallel with shipping new features and fixing bugs.

[bmurphy1976]

I'm a director and one of our teams just spent 8 months doing just that and it was totally justified. They're finally coming up for air and the foundation is significantly improved.

There's nuance here. Every project/team/org is different.

[eviks]

Welcome to Microsoft! Enjoy the ever-growing backlog of bugs to fix!