[serverhorror]

What I don't get is the mindset that refactoring is optional.

If I'd be the customer and people came to me to tell me "Of course we can do feature X but we also LIKE to do Y" what I hear is "We can do what you want for amount EUR x but we'd like to sell you something that costs EUR x+k".

So I'm not talking about the customer believing it's optional, I'm talking about the development teams themselves believing it's optional.

I't would sound a whole lot different to state "Sure we can do X. It's EUR x. This is what is necessary..." (the list of work packages would include refactoring, maybe worded in a way that is better understandable by my customers).

I'm going to spare you the the usual comparison to car makers or whatnot. I think the mistake is with ourselves to simply state that it is necessary and not optional to maintain quality. After all if you can take the risk of implementing features without maintaining a quality product isn't -- and thus loosing customers as implementing features only when maintaining quality -- and thus loosing customers to competitors who are willing to reduce quality for the other risk, and a possibly lower price for a single project or two?