zlacker

In the same vein, don't tell your boss that you're going to refactor something, add tests, or write documentation. These are implementation details that you bake into your estimates and are part of doing software development. Your boss likely has no visibility into the tech debt in your codebase. Talking about refactoring, tests, and documentation gives the boss the opportunity to say "No, don't waste your time on that".

It's not lying to your boss, it's part of doing quality work.

Of course you shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of the good. You do still need to ship. I'm just suggesting that you don't let your boss know the ways in which you can increase your tech debt by cutting corners.

>>justin+(OP)
What we did is to explicitly list bringing any touched modules up to current coding standards as an explicit item on the definition of done. That way team members were expected to include any necessary refactoring and test coverage expansion in their story point estimates.

>>nradov+PA
This is a great way to increase the compliance to coding standards and test coverage. If you can automate enforcement of this, it's even better. For example, your CI build could fail (or just send out notifications) if it detects that a modified file doesn't pass current coding standards.

Of course, it sounds like you have buy-in from management for these quality standards. For people who don't have this kind of buy-in for the whole team, they'll have to work individually to maintain quality.