Sometimes you just need a nasty hack. I’ve added stories to an iteration like “As a developer I want to bring the build time to under 10 minutes, so that I’m not afraid to check in.” I figure that’s ok as long as the team knows that it’s an ugly and dangerous practice.

The danger lies in the slippery slope – if we don’t hold our noses a little when adding the (very occasional) technical stories, then we end up with a stack of things like “refactor the database layer”, and “abstract out the process orchestration”. We lose business focus; the project begins to make great progress to nowhere in particular.