Technical debt: Engineering changes you owe a project before it can be signed off as completed. E.g. software, electrical, mechanical, ergonomic, and other engineering issues to be resolved. If you’re tracking bugs, enhancements, defects, and other project issues, then you no doubt have some technical debt. In other words, your team owes the project something before it can be said to be complete. Every one of those issues should be documented, fixed, and verified by an objective party before project completion. Engineers, and in fact everyone, tend to sweep little things under the rug. Especially when they don’t know how to resolve them. Can’t fix that annoying little bug? Easy answer: don’t tell anyone. That’s just human nature. Hide your deficiencies. Make yourself look good. Ignore the hard things. A good project team culture faces up to difficult little deficiencies. A simple line item in a bug tracking tool like Standard Issue® makes them public, and that resolves most of the “facing up to them” issues. Now everyone knows they exist, and must eventually be dealt with. –ray