I worked on a project in the early 2000s where the client didn’t like to be told that we had x hundred defects in our backlog. To address the negative connotation of the tickets being called “defects” we renamed them System Investigation Requests or as we called them day to day “SIRs” (a quick Google will tell you that this is not not a unique name for defect tickets, but in 25+ years something I’ve only come across a couple of times, and only for projects with this same client).
The truth was was the majority of tickets were actually genuine defects but there were also some requests for refactoring, TODO follow-ups, potential issues that should be investigated that could lead to identifying a defect, or just areas for improvement.
it’s interesting how we perceive things either positively or negatively just based on name, The client was more comfortable knowing these issues were vaguely called SIRs, but if I was the client I would have thought “I know these are defects, you’ve just renamed them” but in this case they were happy calling them something else.