Dr Paidi O’Raghallaigh and Dr Stephen McCarthy at Cork University Business School as part of my PhD studies, and originally published by Cutter Consortium’s Business Agility & Software Engineering Excellence practice on 22nd of July 2021 Take a minute and write an answer to the question, “What is technical debt?” Then read this article and reread your answer — and see if it still makes sense. Technical debt is a common term in technology departments at every company where we’ve worked. Nobody explained technical debt; we assumed it was a fundamental property of the work. We never questioned our understanding of it until we discovered a paper by Edith Tom et al. entitled “An Exploration of Technical Debt.” Turns out, we didn’t understand it at all.