If you limit yourself to refactoring within the scope of the task at hand, then you end up with a mess after a certain size of software project. In my opinion,

If you limit yourself to refactoring within the scope of the task at hand, then you end up with a mess after a certain size of software project. In my opinion, that is why software leads will normally at some point steer the success of future development by refactoring project wide, when and where his/her team can. It's also necessary for performance reasons sometimes.