nus-se-script
commented
4 days ago Team's Response
FinanceBuddy was designed to be an app to help university students keep track of their expenditure to help them keep within their set budgets in that month. While we understand the tester's request and how it could be useful for the user, we feel that this is not an issue we prioritized solving over helping users keep within their budget for the present month first. Such a feature would also require too much time for us to implement within the timespan of this project on top of the other features which were added. Hence, we feel that this is a feature flaw which is out of scope and could be implemented in future iterations of the app.
Items for the Tester to Verify
:question: Issue response
Team chose [response.NotInScope]
- [x] I disagree
Reason for disagreement: From the course website (screenshot provided below), Feature Flaws cannot be considered NotInScope if implementing the fix is essential for the app to be reasonably useful. From my judgement based on reading the DG (screenshot provided below), the target user of this app would start to see drops on usefulness of the program once they start using it beyond the current month. Once multiple months of data have been accumulated, the user would have to manually filter the entries based on date and perform calculations themselves. Moreover, the budgets they had set in previous months would not have been saved as well and they might struggle to remember what they set. Thus, I argue that not implementing this fix would greatly hinder this program's usefulness and this issue should thus be accepted.
Additionally, the same section of the course website states that implementing the fix should not require much additional effort. I believe that doing so should only require the team to adapt the calculations for budget balance to previous months (instead of just limiting it to the current month). Furthermore, saving previous months' budgets can be done within the same Budget.txt file that is used, instead of just relying on it to keep track of the current month's budget and overriding previous months' information.
Issue
It would be good to have a feature whereby a user can view the monthly balances of previous months. This is in line with the goal of tracking budgets (which I interpret to include previous months; it can be beneficial to see trends). Right now the program only calculates it for the current month. I believe this warrants a
severity.Mediumas if a user decides to stick with this program for a whole year for example, they would not just be interested in their balance for the current month they are in. The program can still be used, but causes occasional inconveniences to user like the aforementioned.Screenshots