On the other hand, the importance of a specific task can sometimes be adequately assessed only by a narrow group of people, making it difficult to convey the importance to the larger organization. This usually falls in the realm of performance, "rare" bugs (especially non-deterministic bugs) and code quality.
Such "invisible" work may be difficult to justify over "visible" work, yet is crucial for the long-term quality of the product.
There is a decades-old ERP system (that shall remain unnamed), which to this day doesn't use foreign keys in its database. The consequences of this are not immediately visible, but are very serious in the long term, including data corruption (which I have actually seen with their customer) and (somewhat counter-intuitively) performance (https://stackoverflow.com/a/8154375/533120).
Having had a glimpse of their internal culture, I'm not surprised. Any "foreign key champion" would have been quickly assigned to "more important" tasks.
Such "invisible" work may be difficult to justify over "visible" work, yet is crucial for the long-term quality of the product.
There is a decades-old ERP system (that shall remain unnamed), which to this day doesn't use foreign keys in its database. The consequences of this are not immediately visible, but are very serious in the long term, including data corruption (which I have actually seen with their customer) and (somewhat counter-intuitively) performance (https://stackoverflow.com/a/8154375/533120).
Having had a glimpse of their internal culture, I'm not surprised. Any "foreign key champion" would have been quickly assigned to "more important" tasks.