Refactoring frequently has to compete for resources with new feature requests and bug fixes. Even when team members are sure refactoring will help considerably

Refactoring frequently has to compete for resources with new feature requests and bug fixes. Even when team members are sure refactoring will help considerably, it can be hard to get traction. Performance testing can highlight areas of the code that need help, so work to improve scaling and performance abilities can be used to justify resources to refactor related code. Sometimes a new feature request can be used similarly where the refactoring and new feature development is a better option than trying to develop only with existing code.