I’ll save you from having to read the long background story, but I’m setting up a new bug repository in Jira for one of our company projects. They don’t really want to call it “bugs”, though. I’m trying to come up with something a little more neutral, and since it’s in Jira, I can’t call it Issues. (Everything in Jira is an issue!) So far I have
Problems
Defects
Discrepancies
Obstacles
Anyone have any other suggestions? I feel I’m missing something obvious.
Thanks!
glitch
fault
probably you can go with “defect”, this is quite a formal and well-known synonym for “software bug”
“Error”
Or if you really have the space, “deviation from requirement” 
Mistake
Gap
……………………….
Thing
Twiddle
Quirk
Phenomenon
Oddity
Behavior
Sparkle
Snowflake
HappyTree
More seriously, I’ve heard of this kind of dislike for “negative” terminology at companies before and it feels, to me, like trying to use different words may be masking a deeper problem with the team’s culture. If there’s a blame culture or an overly optimistic culture that doesn’t like admitting to mistakes, then whatever word you pick is going to develop the same negative connotation.
Something to watch for at least.
If I was told I could not use the word that should obviously be used, I would respond with suggestions designed to result in the fool’s errand being given to someone else, such as:
Cock-ups
Sub-optimal behaviours
Badgers
Hexapod invertebrates
Stuff
Gremlins
Idiosyncracies
Imperfections
Peccadillos
Malefactions (or personfactions if your organisation insists on gender-free language)
Regardless of what ends up being used, this list of ideas makes me extremely happy.
Issue(s)? I used a custom system for bugs called “Software Issues”.
When I find a potential issue/problem in the software I call it sometimes: observation
It can take the form of: some notes in the test report, a comment in Jira, a debrief with a dev/pm, a ticket with whatever type is closest to it, a subtask in an epic/task, a post-it, or a whiteboard scribble.
As I don’t initially know where it might fit in the grand scheme of things, or even if and how much it matters for who matters.
The PM/PO then finds a place for it, and a name in the backlog, or we find it together: feature, bug, regression, change, task, won’t fix, tell the dev, low priority/delete.
hiccup
filler characters
Paula Vennels (former British Post office Boss) came up with
“exception or anomaly”. The Post Office then started to refer to known defects in the system as “exceptions”.
Query or Opportunities (to improve)
i can think of these
Just from sheer curiosity, why do they not want to use the term ‘bugs’
If you read the other linked news snippets related to The Post Office Scandal, and read the book, you will know that someone took steps early-on to cover up how a high the number of “bugs” being reported by Fujitsu testers was. And so I’m sure (you have to watch the interviews too) that legal advice was to find a less emotive word. Users were saying the system had bugs, and lawyers suspected lawsuits with that word were coming. Lawyers knew that using a different word would break any correlations a Judge might make between the high reported defect rates often brought up as an evidence item in software trials and the common parlance term “bug” that 90% of adults use. We won’t go into the horror of what happened to the testers.
Yeah, lets start calling them ‘unexpected features’ instead 
To answer OP’s post I use the word ‘glip’ but its not that professional - ‘there is a bit of a glip here’ or ‘when I do this, it starts glipping out’ - more professionally I’ll use the word Observations, there can be negative and positive observations during a exploration test session, for example, or when I’m doing a writeup on a ticket I’ll note any observations down.
If there is a more blatant issue I will just use bug though. No point calling it anything else in my opinion, unless as you said people want to make things sound better than they are.
@conrad.braam great example, and exactly the kind of organizational dysfunction I was concerned about with my reply.
All above written, but then I thought again 
And I created this Bob Ross meme 
- why not
“Happy Accidents”?
@alexschnapper I was thinking of Bob Ross with my “HappyTree” one, too 
“technical issue”
