Bad code smells are an important reason for technical debt.

It is useful to differentiate between types of technical debt.

Even before a technical debt default could set in, the government would be forced to drastically cut current federal spending.

The buildup of technical debt is a major cause for projects to miss deadlines.

Focusing on delivering new functionality may result in increased technical debt.

In open source software, postponing sending local changes to the upstream project is a technical debt.

Software entropy is increased with accumulation of technical debt.

Bad smells (symptoms of inferior code quality that can contribute to technical debt)

Lack of process or understanding, where businesses are blind to the concept of technical debt, and make decisions without considering the implications.

The technical debt induced by cryptographic 'front doors' has left implementations vulnerable for decades.

If this software reaches production then the risks of implementing any future refactors which might address the technical debt increase dramatically.

Common causes of technical debt include (a combination of):

The gap between planned and actual architectures is sometimes understood in terms of the notion of technical debt.

Other instances of technical debt include knowledge that isn't shared around the organization and code that is too confusing to be modified easily.

First, aikido's technical debt to Daito-ryu is immense.

Some experts claim that the "technical debt" metaphor tends to minimize the impact, which results in insufficient prioritization of the necessary work to correct it.

After all, enormous effort and time went into crafting a delicate compromise agreement that succeeded in averting a technical debt default.

Technical debt hinders planning abilities by increasing the amount of unscheduled work as production defects distract the team from further project progress.

The consequence may be that we have to be prepared for further software failures so long as the firms involved allow their technical debts to mount.

This both increases the initial development effort as well as the accumulated "technical debt" of maintaining each of these connectors.

Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy.

Design smells indicate the accumulated design debt (one of the prominent dimensions of technical debt).

An Andy Lester talk entitled "Get out of Technical Debt Now!"

Shostakovich's spiritual and technical debt to Mahler, evident even in his earliest music, grew steadily over the course of his commissar-hounded career.

It is a good practice to identify design smells in a software system and apply appropriate refactoring to eliminate it to avoid accumulation of technical debt.