People with same names not allowed

[carriezhengjr]

After adding a person named John Doe using the command add -p n/John Doe e/johnd@example.com p/98765432 l/1 c/Meta, another person with the same name could not be added with the command add -p n/John Doe e/johndoe@example.com p/12345678 l/1 c/Meta.

It is stated in the UG that "Duplicate persons are not allowed". However, person with the same name should be allowed, because in the real world, people can have the same name but they are not considered duplicates. Hence, this should be allowed in the App too. Otherwise, 2 people with the same name but completely different details cannot be added to the App.

A suggestion is to check for other fields, e.g. email, which are unique to a person.

[nus-pe-script]

Team's Response

The likelihood of having the same name is very low. Furthermore, it is part of our design choice to not allow same name with the same case.

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

Team chose [response.Rejected]

• [x] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: The team should not assume that 2 people with the same name is very rare and simply exclude them from being added to the App. Certain names such as John Tan and Jun Jie can be very common, especially when the people that the NUS CS student meet during his or her internship-hunting period can be from all over the world.

Although this is part of the team’s design choice, this is a feature flaw because the design choice could be improved significantly. Allowing same name does not mean allowing people with the same identity, which could be a much better design for the App. The team could have checked for other unique details such as email address instead of the name to identify people added to the App.

Hence, this is tagged as a Feature flaw in the App as there is a problem with how the adding of a person was designed. In the real world, people can have the same name, so this should be allowed in the App too. It could have been implemented to work in a better way (from the end-user's point of view) without much additional effort and serves greater use to the user.

---

:question: Issue severity

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

• [x] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: This is marked as Medium since certain names such as Alex Tan, John Tan and Jun Jie can be very common around the world.

Furthermore, most students will apply for a lot of internships each round (the recommended number is about 20 from Indeed), so the target users will really meet a lot of people and would need to add many people to the App. This greatly increases the possibility of people with same name but different identities.

In addition, this issue affects the basic feature of the App which is adding a person, so it should be one of the first crucial considerations when designing the add feature.

---