[tetonraven]

Another thing. Don't create "technical stories". They are not user stories and that undermines Scrum in a variety of ways. One important consideration, too, is this... Even if it's completely horrid code, unless there's a bug against it, it's presumably working in production and it's hard to show value in fixing it. When bad code hinders progress on new functionality, though, there's clear value in changing it and it can be done with appropriate visibility on the changed areas.