Process debt
Process debt is the accumulated friction from team processes that no longer fit the work they govern, sprint structures that produce overcommitment, retrospectives that surface action items without follow-through, on-call rotations that never get re-tuned, estimation rituals that produce false confidence.
Process debt as a named concept appears in the 1980s software process literature (Lehmann's 'Laws of Software Evolution' implicitly addresses it; modern formal treatments include Codabux & Williams 2013 and Tom Lehmann 1980). The distinction from technical debt is sharp: technical debt lives in the code; process debt lives in the team's working agreements, tools, and rituals. Process debt is typically invisible to engineering surveys that focus on technical debt and tool friction, which is part of why it has been a missing variable in engineering well-being research. Symptoms include: sprints consistently missing commitments; retrospectives that re-surface the same issues quarter after quarter; high engineer-reported context-switching cost despite no obvious project complexity.