Refactoring and code cleanup are everyone's job

Code is like fish. Over time (and a surprisingly short period of time), it "goes bad" and starts to smell. While fish must be discarded, code can be improved.

Code can be messy for a number of reasons. It can be assembled from older (poorly written) systems. It can be developed under aggressive timeframes. The developers can be careless or inexperienced.

You want to improve your code. Messy code is hard to understand, difficult to debug, and problematic to change. Projects with messy code find that they miss deadlines and have a large number of defects.

Refactoring is the process of changing the structure of code while maintaining its behavior. By changing the structure, you can improve the readability and maintainability of the code. By keeping the functionality, you keep all current features.

One might think that assigning the task of refactoring to a subset of the team is sufficient. The idea is that this subteam will improve the code, cleaning up the mess that has developed over time. But I believe that such an approach is ineffective.

Refactoring (and code quality in general) is a task for everyone on the project. The approach of a separate team does not work. Here's why:

The team members dedicated to the task are viewed as a separate team. Usually they are viewed as the elite members of the team; more darkly as diva-developers. Sometimes they are viewed as servants, or a lower caste of the team. Fracturing the team in this way benefits no one.

Other (non refactoring) members of the team can become sloppy. They know that someone will come after them to clean their code. That knowledge sets up an incentive for sloppy code -- or at least removes the incentive for clean code.

The biggest reason, though, is one of numbers. The refactoring team is smaller than the rest of the team. This smaller team is attempting to clean up the mess created by the entire team. Your team's current processes create messy code (for whatever reason) so that larger (non-refactoring) team is still creating a mess. The smaller team attempts to clean while the larger team keeps creating a mess. This doesn't work.

As I see it, the only way to clean code is to get everyone involved. No separate team, no elite squad, no penalty assignments. The team's process must change to create clean code (or to improve messy code). Nothing less will do.