On my way to work today I decided that some major refactoring needed to be done to some code that I had written before.  There had been multiple changes made to the design and, due to time constraints, the code had not yet been cleaned up.  There was another developer who had been having trouble working with the code because, let's face it, most people don't write code the same way, even when there are standards for the company.  So in an attempt to make my life easier, my coworkers lives easier, and become a better programmer I started to clean house.

I realised soon after that scrubbing the code would also help to resolve a bug that affecting the program.  Which, of course, got me excited.  I just love it when things work .  So I talked to my boss for a minute about some of the changes that I thought we could make.  This is where things went bad.  He told me that "refactoring is a low priority right now".  Now, while refactoring is not the most important thing in the world alot of the time, it does make code more efficent and also could solve problems.  So i ask you, my fellow devs.......

As agile programmers how important is refactoring?  Is it something we should save for a rainy day, or something we should keep up on?  What do you think?