Technical Debt Inventory and Attributes

A Technical Debt Item qualifies for the Technical Debt Inventory when it represents the smallest independently identifiable, recordable, assessable, assignable, prioritizable, and closable instance of Technical Debt that the enterprise governs. The item must describe a technical condition, decision, omission, compromise, or unresolved obligation associated with one or more governed Assets and preserve the information required to manage its ownership, lifecycle, decisions, evidence, remediation or other treatment, validation, and closure.

A technical observation does not qualify merely because it is old, undesirable, nonstandard, discovered by a tool, or recorded as a Defect, Problem, Disruption, Risk, Architecture Exception, Security Finding, backlog task, Project obligation, or Release concern. Those records remain authoritative for their own disciplines and may be linked to a Technical Debt Item when qualification confirms a separate debt condition. Technical Debt Items are also distinct from Assets: an Asset may carry several Technical Debt Items, and one systemic Technical Debt Item may affect several Assets.