Customers can have the same phone number and email

[tlx02]

Steps to reproduce: type "editcus 1 p/91234567 e/johndoe@example.com" type "editcus 2 p/91234567 e/johndoe@example.com"

Expected: an error message regarding duplicate phone number and email

Actual: successfully edited the customer's details

It is unlikely for 2 different customers to have the same phone number and email address. Thus, such a situation is likely to be due to a mistake by the user. However, the app does not warn the user and immediately overwrites the original details. This can cause the user to lose important information if it had been a wrong input by the user.

[nus-se-script]

Team's Response

Hi,

Thank you for your bug report. However, we'll be marking this issue of customers sharing duplicate contact information as NotInScope.

Allow me to share with you our reasoning process:

1. It might be possible that 2 customers share identical contact information (though unlikely). Consider the case where 2 family members are customer of the artist. Since they wish to keep only 1 point of contact with the artist, they decide to provide the same shared email and phone number to the artist (which happens). However, because they each order commissions separately from the artist, they should be considered as separate customers. ArtBuddy should therefore not prevent users from adding customers with duplicate contact information as this could result in overzealous validation instead.

2. As suggested, a better way to handle duplicate contact information might be to warn users, and ask for confirmation to proceed overriding data in these cases. However...

   1. This requires a rather significant amount of effort to implement, as it is quite different from how other commands work in ArtBuddy, ArtBuddy will not just have to check for duplicate contacts (which is an additional overhead), but would also have to ask for confirmation, parse this confirmation before proceeding with the command.

   2. In addition, since this likely will only occur in rare instances, we do not think that this is a very important feature, and can be deprioritised and pushed to later versions of ArtBuddy since we had to rush out quite a lot of features and bug fixes up till v1.4 (and it is fine to delay lower priority work until future iterations).

   3. Furthermore, this is simply a more advanced version of duplicate detection of ArtBuddy (on top of checking for names, also check contact information). However, as stated in the FAQ section of our UG, we have already mentioned that duplicate detection in v1.4 of ArtBuddy is limited to checking customer names (case-sensitively).

   4. Lastly, even without these duplicate checks we think that ArtBuddy is still at least reasonably useful for our target audience.

Hence, we believe that this bug report qualifies for response.NotInScope.

Hope that clarifies things, thank you!

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Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

Team chose [response.NotInScope]

• [ ] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: [replace this with your explanation]

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:question: Issue type

Team chose [type.FeatureFlaw] Originally [type.FunctionalityBug]

• [ ] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: [replace this with your explanation]

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:question: Issue severity

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

• [ ] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: [replace this with your explanation]

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