I’m a huge fan of always seasoning iterations with a couple of technical stories. It’s great for closing the feedback loop and empowers developers to improve the way they deliver products.
Jack Milunsky discusses the pro’s and cons of putting technical stories in the product backlog.
But what about the type of story asked by one of the members “As a development team member, I want the existing unit tests to run under CruiseControl, so that I know if anything breaks”. Where does this belong? Well this is a perfectly written story but the story really has no ultimate value for the end user at least not directly.
I personally feel that if you don’t have some official place to put these kinds of improvements, they will always get shoved aside in the name of “real features”. Maybe adding them to the official backlog sows confusion and strife, but trying to sneak them into task estimates or something seems just as dangerous, because they’re effectively invisible and untracked.
via Technical stories - are they included on the backlog? [AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com]
