Making wrong edits to the InterviewDate in the storage file prevents the application from starting up

[Jaspertzx]

Details: When editing the storage file, sometimes the user may be careless and enter the wrong date format. However, the app does not perform as intended and will not start up. contradicting what is written on the UG.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Run the application
2. Create a few internship applications
3. Close the application
4. Open the storage JSON file.
5. Edit the any application date to "interviewDate" : "1100",

Expected: The application to restart to a fresh state, as stated in the UG.

Actual:

Application does not start and throws error in the terminal:

Screenshots:

Rationale: I put this as Medium as I believe that users tend to be careless and this might happen when manually editing the file, but the application doesn't prompt them to the error

[nus-se-script]

Team's Response

Dear tester, we want to thank you for your feedback.

We would like to change the the severity to low: "A flaw that is unlikely to affect normal operations of the product. Appears only in very rare situations and causes a minor inconvenience only". Frequent users are more likely to use InternHub to edit their applications, rather than via manual edit of user data via text editing, which defeats the purpose of having an app from the very beginning to most users.

Best regards, JAYME

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue severity

Team chose [severity.Low] Originally [severity.Medium]

• [x] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: I disagree with this response for the following reasons:

1. The statement in the response "Frequent users are more likely to use InternHub to edit their applications, rather than via manual edit of user data via text editing, which defeats the purpose of having an app from the very beginning to most users." is contradictory to the InternHub's User Guide, as it mentions that users have the flexibility to edit the date in the storage JSON file to add interviews that have already passed the current date (you may refer to the screenshot below.). In fact, if users wish to enter an interview that happened before the current date as a way of keeping track of their internship applications (which is a objective of this application), they are required to edit the storage JSON file to do so. This means that users are expected to edit the JSON storage file. Thus, input validation is expected to be conducted to ensure that users enter the correct input, and invalid inputs should be handled gracefully and should NOT crash the application as shown above. (please refer to the screenshot of InternHub's UserGuide, 3.4.6 Internship Date, point number 3)

2. The statement in the response "Appears only in very rare situations and causes a minor inconvenience only" does not correctly describe this error. The outcome is here is disastrous as the application crashes and no application error message is thrown (apart from the terminal). This means that as a user, not only will the application not be able to run, but no error is prompted as to why this is so. This means that the user is kept in the dark on what the error is and how to make the necessary remedies to fix this. Though this may not happen to some users, the outcome of the application being unable to start up or crashing is a major inconvenience.

3. The severity I have originally given is a medium, as I was not sure during the PE and followed the PE guidelines of giving the lower severity, despite the application being unable to run when this case occurs. In fact, I could argue that this deserves a high severity, as changing the JSON storage file was mentioned in the user guide as a user step to include past interview dates in the user guide. This process was not an extreme use case, but rather simply following the user guide provided and accidentally entering the time of the interview rather than the date. User's are careless sometimes and this could happen under a normal use case stated in the User Guide.

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