Software architect, agilist, programming language nerd, game dev by night, fitness enthusiast and proud father of two. Development Director at Unity Technologies.
You are right that this thinking could be abused. I'll make two points on this:
We trust our developers and encourage them to include technical-debt reduction and refactoring in to the stories. So if doing thing A properly requires that I start by improving the existing code base then you do it, we won't question you.
"What will I have to show" is just one way of teasing out the essence of what you are doing, it should not be the defining metric for prioritising your work.
But like with all in agile, we need to focus on honest communication between product needs and responsible development. Maybe I've been lucky but with the teams I've used it with it has worked well and people were not afraid to still pick "invisible" tasks when they considered them important.
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You are right that this thinking could be abused. I'll make two points on this:
We trust our developers and encourage them to include technical-debt reduction and refactoring in to the stories. So if doing thing A properly requires that I start by improving the existing code base then you do it, we won't question you.
"What will I have to show" is just one way of teasing out the essence of what you are doing, it should not be the defining metric for prioritising your work.
But like with all in agile, we need to focus on honest communication between product needs and responsible development. Maybe I've been lucky but with the teams I've used it with it has worked well and people were not afraid to still pick "invisible" tasks when they considered them important.