nus-se-bot
commented
5 days ago Team's Response
No details provided by team.
The 'Original' Bug
[The team marked this bug as a duplicate of the following bug]
deleteA does not allow deletion of existing appointment
Even though the appointment exists for both patient and doctor, I was not allowed to delete the appointment. It was not specified in UG that past appointments were not allowed to be deleted, so this behavior does not match UG. It would make sense to allow users the freedom to delete past appointments. Futhermore, the error message does not seem to match.
[original: nus-cs2103-AY2425S1/pe-interim#2984] [original labels: severity.High type.FunctionalityBug]
Their Response to the 'Original' Bug
[This is the team's response to the above 'original' bug]
Hi! Thank you very much for the bug report!
Our team has reviewed this and agree that the inconsistency between being able to add an appointment in the past but not being able to delete it could inconvenience some users.
However, while we agree with the details regarding the bug, we do not agree that it would be fair to consider this a bug of
severity.High. Consider the requirements for a bug to beseverity.High:
severity.High: A flaw that affects most users and causes major problems for users. i.e., only problems that make the product almost unusable for most users should have this label.Our team does not believe that this bug does fulfills the following requirements:
The bug does not affect most users. Considering the nature of the healthcare industry, the entire point of an appointment system is to facilitate management of mostly, if not only upcoming appointments. Given the focus and challenges of scheduling appointments within the healthcare industry (Gupta & Denton, 2008), revisiting appointments in the past is rarely or never done; instead, the hectic and ever-busy nature of the medical industry culminates in infinitely more management to be done for upcoming appointments and backlogs (Laan et al., 2017). With our target group being medical staff like doctors or nurses, and not auditors, there is usually little need to add appointments in the past.
Likewise, for the same aforementioned reasons, although we allowed adding appointments in the past (perhaps for medical staff to use as a placeholder to indicate an appointment was missed), we believe that being unable to delete such appointments would not cause major problems for users. This would not affect any of the important work that medical staff have to do to help manage their appointments with their patients and doctors, and will not affect any of the appointments that are scheduled for the future; the ability to delete such entries is unlikely to significantly impact the workflow of medical professionals, users can still perform essential tasks and use the essential functionalities provided to schedule and manage appointments where relevant.
Naturally, we do not believe that this bug would, in any way, make the product unusable for most users. The application can still be used for day-to-day appointment scheduling and all the relevant functions required to achieve this outcome is not affected by this bug. Medical staff who may want to use this application, did not do so (at least we believe so) because they wanted to note down and manage appointments in the past. Rather, we believe that they want to use the application so that they can provide the best possible care for their current patients, in the present. In short, it is unlikely that managing historical appointments would be a central or frequent use case for most of our target audience / users.
While this bug is worth addressing for a smoother user experience when it comes to managing past appointments, given the primary function, focus and purpose of healthcare management programs centered around care for upcoming / on-demand / current patient experience (Jafarzadeh, 2022), the bug is unlikely to arise in a primary and typical use of the application, and users can continue to use the product in spite of the bugs. Hence, our team suggests that the severity be dropped to
severity.Medium.References
Gupta, D., & Denton, B. (2008, December -). Appointment scheduling in health care: Challenges and opportunities. Brian Denton. Retrieved November 18, 2024, from https://btdenton.engin.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/138/2015/08/Gupta-2008.pdf
Jafarzadeh, S. (2022, March 3). Appointment Scheduling Problem in Complexity Systems of the Healthcare Services: A Comprehensive Review. PubMed Central. Retrieved November 18, 2024, from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8913063/
Laan, C., Vrugt, M. v. d., Olsman, J., Boucherie, R. J., & National Library of Medicine. (2017, Nov 28). Static and dynamic appointment scheduling to improve patient access time. National Library of Medicine (National Center for Biotechnology Information). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6452836/
Items for the Tester to Verify
:question: Issue duplicate status
Team chose to mark this issue as a duplicate of another issue (as explained in the Team's response above)
- [ ] I disagree
Reason for disagreement: [replace this with your explanation]
I was able to add an appointment of a date in the past, but I was unable to delete the appointment of the date in the past. This could cause significant problems to the user when he is using the app and would like to delete an appointment from the past.
I understand it is better to allow adding appointments in the past, but this should be consistent across all commands and not just adding.
Steps to recreate: 1) Add an appointment in the past, for example, 2023-12-31 15:28 2) Try to delete the appointment in the past
Expected outcome: Appointment successfully deleted Actual outcome: Unable to delete appointment.