Hacker News Reader

And then the refactoring may never happen.

'Phase 2 never happens'

Don’t do it at some later date, do it right after. Just ship the low risk fix first. Otherwise if you’re not careful phase 1 never happens either.

The obvious question in any organisation with a layer of project managers is how to explain that you've delivered the fix and you haven't moved on to fixing the next most important thing or adding some other new functionality.

Yes, that's probably a sign of poor project management or organisational brokenness. But it's also probably the reality for most people.

The bug fix might be the high risk change, since it's a hack on top of a hack that you think might cancel each other out

I just mentioned it in this comment[0] but I disagree with this premise too since sometimes it's more work to fix the bug without the refactor:

> It also misses the point that sometimes refactoring makes it _easier_ to fix the bug, and that a large part of fixing a bug is understanding exactly what's happening with the code, which refactoring can also make easier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32749390

Shipped the bug fix that I don't understand. Something else broke, had to revert.