Agile leads to technical debt?

Does Agile lead to technical debt?

The phrase "technical debt" was coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992.  Ward is known for a few significant things: wikis, CRC cards, and influencing Extreme Programming (XP).

XP was by far the dominant "lightweight methodology" when the Agile Manifesto was created.

So it seems rather odd to suggest that Agile leads to technical debt.  All the talk about technical debt came from Agile people.

Here's Ward talking about the history of "technical debt":

Here's a couple articles by Martin Fowler on technical debt:

• http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html
• http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebtQuadrant.html

Ward and Martin are signatories of the Agile Manifesto, which makes sense because they participated in creating it.

It's really ironic that people today might believe that Agile leads to technical debt.

But I can understand the belief.

XP is no longer what people typically think of when they think "Agile".  There has been a shift to Scrum and Kanban and management issues in general.  I can understand that people exposed to Flaccid Scrum might believe that Agile equates to poor technical practice.

The more controversial, though unoriginal, claim would be that XP practices lead to technical debt.  In other words, claiming that the community that developed and embraced the concept of being mindful of technical debt advocates practices that lead to it.