I have spent the last few days at work doing some intense refactoring of a seemingly complex jQuery plug-in. I managed to cut it down by 140 lines and speed it up immensely. Whilst it would have saved time if I had written the plug-in myself in the first place, I cannot be expected to do everything and nobody else at work would improve their jQuery and javascript writing skills if I did so. I therefore label my time spent as paying of some of the technical debt that we create, in the process of releasing the software as quickly as we can. If you have not come across this metaphor before, here it is:

It really nails the reason that as developers, we try to refactor regularly. Unfortunately refactoring is not something that people outside of the development community tend to understand and it is considered a waste of time all too often. I think use of this metaphor may just help those people understand.