Unsafe manual editing of data file

[pyk595]

This feature does not protect the users' data. If a user accidentally overwrites the data unknowingly after a faulty start-up, all the data is gone. Instead, having the software make a recovery backup upon an error in the data file would have been more defensive. I gave this flaw a low severity because I'm deliberately testing this feature but I might even argue that users don't really read everything before use and might be more careless, so it could be a medium severity instead.

[nus-se-bot]

Team's Response

While this might inconvenience users, this is not a feature flaw of the product. We specifically warned users against this behaviour, and did not claim anywhere in our documentation that we support recovery of data.

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

Team chose [response.NotInScope]

• [x] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: There is only a warning in the user guide, not in the software itself during the failure. As we cannot expect users to be perfect users of the software, and neither can we expect them to be reading the user guide every single time they start up the software, there will eventually be a user that ends up accidentally deleting his whole data file by accident. The argument for having a warning in the user guide is also not very strong, because the team did not offer suggestions to the user on how they can protect their data if they wanted to make manual edits. A simple line of "Make a copy of your data file before you you make changes to the data file" would have made their claim stronger. Giving a low severity is already very lenient in my opinion, as stated in my original bug report. Recall that the user will lose ALL their data upon failure, which should have been an automatic high severity level.

---