Sometimes I think that offensive work is always prioritized ovee defensive work. And then execs and stakeholders think when the code is a mess and a simple cha

Sometimes I think that offensive work is always prioritized ovee defensive work. And then execs and stakeholders think when the code is a mess and a simple change takes a day and a half it's the developers fault. And it's difficult to say the least to convince stakeholders to defer a feature for a little bit of refactoring. This why I think it might be useful to allow the stakeholders and pms to decide the % of time spent on defensive work instead of what defensive work to do. And then you have a specific metric on technical debt(we budgeted 30% for defensive work and we've only spent 10% that's a 1000hrs of technical debt) Something to specifically point to when a stakeholder asks why is this taking so long or why is the application buggy. And ideally this caused a company wide increase in the allotted time for defensive work. Bonus:It will also give developers who like working on clean projects a number to ask when being hired.