Name parameters too restrictive

[rama-pang]

The application only accepts names with the following restrictions (quoted from the User Guide):

• Names must contain at least 1 word, and at most 1 space is allowed between words.
• Only English alphabets and the symbols / , ' , - are accepted and cannot be surrounded by spaces. e.g. Smith - Jones is invalid, but Smith-Jones is valid

These restrictions are too restrictive. Some reasons are the following:

• It's not uncommon for users to accidentally type in an extra space.
• One of my CS2103T group members has the name 'Izzah (with no preceding letter before the ' character); I can't add her name into the application.
• Names containing special characters outside /, ', and - are becoming more common: e.g., Elon Musk who named his child with the character Æ.

[nus-se-script]

Team's Response

Such unique names are very rare and hence would cause very minor and occasional inconveniences to few users. It is also not practical to consider every combination of names as this might mean that we have to use strings without any regex for names.

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

Team chose [response.NotInScope]

• [x] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: According to the User Guide:

Tuthub is a desktop app for NUS professors who wish to track and choose their next batch of teaching assistants/tutors based on their past performance and records but have little time to spare for tedious administrative work. Tuthub helps profs who can type fast find the best TAs faster than traditional Graphical User Interface (GUI) apps.

One of the key points here are NUS professors. The application is specifically designed to be able to track NUS students (among others, e.g., PhD students) as potential TAs. I give one of my teammate's names here (first name 'Izzah) as a concrete example of a current NUS student, which is unable to be entered into the application.

True, the use of ' might be uncommon without a preceding letter. However, there are other examples of names which are unable to be entered into the application, some of them as follows:

• Ang Jun Xiang, Shaune
• Chan Chang Yu, Linus
• Cheong Wei Shan, Samuel

All three of these names are found from LumiNUS's CS2103T Class & Groups section, page one (out of eight total pages). A single page contains a list of 50 students. This means that, on page one, approximately 6% (or more, since I only checked for the character ,) are unable to be entered into the application. Although 50 students is a fairly small sample, I believe estimating that overall at least 5% of NUS students contain special characters is fairly accurate.

When the application, which MUST be able to enter an NUS student's name (as they are often TAs), is unable to enter over 5% of NUS students' names, this is a serious feature flaw. Consider the following use case of the application by an NUS professor:

• The NUS professor decided to enter some students' names with special characters. However, as these names are unable to be entered into the application, the NUS professor decided to erase all occurrences of the special characters and enter the (incomplete) names.
• The NUS professor emailed the students' they marked as potential TAs. However, a few of these names are missing certain special characters (e.g., , or ').

While some people might tolerate a missing , or ' from their names, some others might not. Misspelling someone's names is an unprofessional behavior, which can be caused by the restriction on names on the application.

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:question: Issue severity

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

• [x] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: According to the User Guide:

Tuthub is a desktop app for NUS professors who wish to track and choose their next batch of teaching assistants/tutors based on their past performance and records but have little time to spare for tedious administrative work. Tuthub helps profs who can type fast find the best TAs faster than traditional Graphical User Interface (GUI) apps.

One of the key points here are NUS professors. The application is specifically designed to be able to track NUS students (among others, e.g., PhD students) as potential TAs. I give one of my teammate's names here (first name 'Izzah) as a concrete example of a current NUS student, which is unable to be entered into the application.

True, the use of ' might be uncommon without a preceding letter. However, there are other examples of names which are unable to be entered into the application, some of them as follows:

• Ang Jun Xiang, Shaune
• Chan Chang Yu, Linus
• Cheong Wei Shan, Samuel

All three of these names are found from LumiNUS's CS2103T Class & Groups section, page one (out of eight total pages). A single page contains a list of 50 students. This means that, on page one, approximately 6% (or more, since I only checked for the character ,) are unable to be entered into the application. Although 50 students is a fairly small sample, I believe estimating that overall at least 5% of NUS students contain special characters is fairly accurate.

When the application, which MUST be able to enter an NUS student's name (as they are often TAs), is unable to enter over 5% of NUS students' names, this is a serious feature flaw. Consider the following use case of the application by an NUS professor:

• The NUS professor decided to enter some students' names with special characters. However, as these names are unable to be entered into the application, the NUS professor decided to erase all occurrences of the special characters and enter the (incomplete) names.
• The NUS professor emailed the students' they marked as potential TAs. However, a few of these names are missing certain special characters (e.g., , or ').

While some people might tolerate a missing , or ' from their names, some others might not. Misspelling someone's names is an unprofessional behavior, which can be caused by the restriction on names on the application.

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