The metaphor of technical debt is widely used in software project management in general and especially Scrum. This article written by Philippe Kruchten, Robert L. Nord and Ipek Ozkaya try to put this concept in perspective, discussing how it has become somewhat diluted lately with its extension to other areas than code or its associations with tools like static code analyzers.
Using only tools to measure technical debt might lead to leaving aside potential technical debt items that are undetectable by tools like structural or architectural debt. They argue we need a better definition of what constitutes technical debt and some perspective or viewpoints that let us reason across a wide range of technical debt. They also discusses how we could tackle technical debt or at least avoid accumulating too much of it.
Read the complete article on http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/so/2012/06/mso2012060018.html