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We took an empirical approach to understand what engineers mean when they refer to technical debt. We started by interviewing subject matter experts at the company, focusing our discussions to generate options for two survey questions: one asked engineers about the underlying causes of the technical debt they encountered, and the other asked engineers what mitigations would be appropriate to fix this debt. We included these questions in the next round of our quarterly engineering survey and gave engineers the option to select multiple root causes and multiple mitigations. Most engineers selected several options in response to each of the items. We then performed a factor analysis to discover patterns in the responses, and we reran the survey the next quarter with refined response options, including an “other” response option to allow engineers to write in descriptions. We did a qualitative analysis of the descriptions in the “other” bucket, included novel concepts in our list, and iterated until we hit the point where< 2% of the engineers selected “other.” This provided us with a collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive list of 10 categories of technical debt: