[prostoalex]

> Btw, Proper scrum/agile encourages people to refactor and keep technical debt down.

How? At the place I worked that followed agile by the book the backlog prioritization was done by product owner, who prioritized by the value to the business. Since it was a customer- (and hence sales-) driven business, any trivial change that was visible to the customers ("change subheading to Verdana") was prioritized higher than any refactoring.

Two-week sprints also meant you couldn't really commit to anything that would take two weeks + 1 day.

[UK-AL]

We allocate so many sprint storypoints for keeping technical debt down. That's a fixed amount, immune from interference. The value justification is thst it allows you implement features faster long term rather getting clunkly a codebase. So it does provide customer value.

For long tasks you use a thing called epics.