Here is an interesting article on what is technical debt, a term we frequently use in agile development and club everything related to system and workflow improvement under it.
As per Peter Green, author of this article, Technical debt is the conscious choice to get to market faster by skipping some steps required for long term code sustainability. For example, team discovered an issue during its regular testing before release of that feature but decided to skip that for the cost of reaching out to market early. Something which was not thought of by PdM or poorly written code to save on time or missed out tasks during regular testing are NOT examples of technical debt.
Btw, here’s a video of Ward Cunningham himself explaining the debt metaphor: http://youtu.be/pqeJFYwnkjE, and some ways in which it has been misunderstood since he coined it, starting at 3:15.
