In recent years, the metaphor of technical debthas received considerable attention, especially fromthe agile community. Still, despite the fact that agilepractices are increasingly used in critical domains,to the best of our knowledge, there are no studiesinvestigating the occurrence of technical debt incritical software development projects. The results ofan exploratory field study conducted across severalprojects reveal that a variety of business andenvironmental factors cause the occurrence oftechnical debt in critical domains. Using GroundedTheory method, these factors are categorized asambiguity of requirement, diversity of projects,inadequate knowledge management, and resourceconstraints to form a theoretical model. Followingprevious studies we suggest that integrating agilepractices, such as iterative development, reviewmeetings, and continuous testing, into common plandrivenprocesses enables development teams to betteridentify and manage technical debt.
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