Team's Response

Firstly, this is the expected behavior of our app so it should not be considered as a FunctionalityBug. What the tester seems to be proposing is that there should be a feature that catches duplicate emails, so we have relabeled this as a feature flaw (i.e. missing feature). Furthermore, it is expected to be extremely unlikely that our target users (1-1 private home tutors) mistakenly type the same email for 2 students, so there is very little harm done by not including this feature of detecting duplicate emails within our app. Therefore, it should not be of medium severity.

More importantly, the omission of this feature does not make the app any less useable for our TA. It might even be beneficial.

...all emails should be unique...

This StackOverflow post explains why it may not be correct to make this assumption. While email addresses are typically unique, it is not impossible for them to be shared. It is possible for multiple individuals to use the same email address. It is more reasonable that our TA expects that some family members may share an email address. We appreciate the suggestion but we do not think what the tester brought up is a bug, as we think that the tester's expectation that our app should disallow duplicate emails seems to be mistaken.

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

Team chose [response.Rejected]

[x] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: As with my opinion of adding students with duplicate emails, the same applies to the editing of students' particulars.

"While it may be true that the odds of adding a similar email mistakenly might be low, it is not improbable as well. Suppose I am trying to add student A to the address book. I just started using TAB and have a huge list of student names and emails to import. However, I accidentally skipped a line down and added student B's email to student A. I then proceed to add student B correctly and so forth.

Fast forward to the day I actually need student A's email, I may be emailing student B instead since there was no warning that the email was a duplicate.

While it may be probable that there exist students sharing the same email, the odds are extremely slim since email creation is free and usually personal. This added level of check will not prove fatal for the application and serves to prevent the user errors more often than not. In addition, I appreciate the StackOverflow thread. However, this is also not an organization and reuse of emails is highly unlikely."

:question: Issue type

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

[ ] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: [replace this with your explanation]

:question: Issue severity

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

[ ] I disagree