Rally Best Practices

When it comes time to sit down and develop something from the bottom up it some time and energy needs to be spent on architectural design.  In the Agile process the goal is to do the least amount work needed to get the job done well and accepted by the user.  Architectural considerations however have a strong bias to the technical side in the realm of developers.  Without some form of architectural thinking going on at the beginning and throughout the project the maintainability and desired level of flexibility are hard to achieve.

Our agile team is currently creating architecture stories to go before development stories.  But we are not entirely happy in how we plan for these stories or estimate them.  In addition we are struggling with what types of things should come out of these stories.

So what is your team doing to make sure there is a common architecture and that architectural needs get addressed throughout the life of your Agile project?