nus-pe-bot
commented
11 months ago Team's Response
We believe that TAs should be able to contact their students in a more direct manner than via email, so as to be able to contact them in urgent situations, hence we added the compulsory phone number field.
While we do agree that it is not standard practice to collect phone numbers, we favoured using that as a field over Telegram usernames, due to the following.
NUS does not collect Telegram handles as official data. The most instinctive and official form of communication would definitely be by phone number, especially if the TA needs to contact the student in an urgent scenario or vice versa. Furthermore, if we run the assumption that there may be exchange students from other parts of the world joining the class, it would be unreasonable to assume that they have Telegram too. Therefore, the safest and most immediate form of contact would be by phone.
We feel that this report does pose a valid issue but it should not be something that we should be penalized for in this iteration of TAvigator. It poses a more general issue related to whether phone numbers and/or other methods of contacting a student should be collected, which we cannot answer, since arguments can be made against either choices.
We believe that our decision based on valid considerations, as stated above, and hence think that this cannot be considered as a feature flaw within our product's scope.
Instead, further decisions could made regarding this in future versions. As such, we marked this bug report as NotInScope.
Items for the Tester to Verify
:question: Issue response
Team chose [response.NotInScope]
- [x] I disagree
Reason for disagreement: It is highly unlikely that a tutor would need to urgently contact a student. In any case, if they do they can obtain their phone numbers via the school that has all their information. I believe that this is a feature flaw as it will be a significant hindrance for tutors who simply wish to mark attendance. My argument is not that there shouldn't be a field for phone numbers, but that it should not be compulsory.
Exchange students cater to the context of NUS when they come here, they all download telegram for their study time here. Regardless, I believe that it shouldn't be a compulsory field as it does not accurately cater to the target audience. It is highly inconvenient to force tutors to collect phone numbers when 99% of the time, they won't need it.
It is exactly because "It poses a more general issue related to whether phone numbers and/or other methods of contacting a student should be collected, which we cannot answer, since arguments can be made against either choices.", that it should be an optional field, not compulsory. I do believe that phone numbers should be allowed to be stored.
Considering that this application is marketed towards TAs, it is not standard practice at all for TAs to have the phone numbers of all their students, since they can be contacted via email or other methods.
Making the phone number field compulsory therefore does not accurately cater to the target audience.
It does not make sense that TAs have to have the students phone numbers in order to keep track of them.