The term technical debt was coined by Ward Cunningham and mentioned that some problems with code are like financial debt. As per Ward “With borrowed money, you can do something sooner than you might otherwise, but until you pay back that money you will pay interest”. Technical Debt is something where you are required to do refactoring or IMPROVEMENT related to the source code and its architecture. 

Factors adding up to technical debts cab be issues related to architecture, structure, duplication, TEST coverage, comments and documentation, potential bugs, complexity, code smells, coding practices and style. All these types of issues incur technical debt because they have a negative impact on productivity. Any compromise with the quality during the development lifecycle leads to technical debts, the software becomes fragile and expensive to extend and MAINTAIN. With the evolution of agile, we have witnessed a gradual decrease in the AMOUNT of technical debt and this was feasible because now we follow SHORTER cycles and frequent software updates require high quality, hence, the chances of piled up issues lower.

As per Atlassian “Technical debt is the difference between what was promised and what was actually delivered. Preventing technical debt is what allows development to be agile in the long run.”