soc-se-bot
commented
1 day ago Team's Response
Changing bug severity from Medium to Low
As a team, we agree that this is indeed a feature flaw. However, we do believe that this inconvenience/issue would only come up in rare occasions as clinics would most likely save a patient's/doctor's full name and it is very rare for them to have exactly same full names. Hence, this situation is rare (though not impossible).
Items for the Tester to Verify
:question: Issue severity
Team chose [severity.Low]
Originally [severity.Medium]
- [x] I disagree
Reason for disagreement: Thank you for acknowledging the feature flaw. While I acknowledge your response of severity.Low, I maintain that the severity of this issue should be rated as severity.Medium. This is because repeated instances of identical names are not as rare as suggested, especially in the context of a medical address book that retains records over extended periods. Small clinics typically receive an average of 11-20 patients per day. Over the course of a year, this translates to approximately 3,500-4,000 patient entries, considering 250 working days per year.
Frequency of identical names: As the clinic's database accumulates tens of thousands of patient and doctor records over several years, the likelihood of encountering duplicate names rises significantly. Especially since the UG did not specify the intended geographic location for this medical address book, this makes it critical to consider international use cases where name duplication is prevalent such as China (Common surnames like Zhang, Wang, and Li), India (common names like Ramesh, Suresh, and Kumar are frequent, especially when paired with common last names like Singh or Sharma) where it is not unusual for multiple individuals to share the exact full name.
Consequence of the issue: Failure to handle identical names can result in operational challenges such as misidentification or the inability to properly access or update patient records, in serious cases, even having to reject the patient from getting treated. This can be detrimental to a clinic's reputation and could have serious implications if patient care is affected due to database limitations.
Therefore, this flaw should be considered of medium severity, as it could cause occasional inconvenience to users, particularly as the database scales and grows over time. Clinics relying on accurate patient identification for official documentation and medical dispensation should not face disruptions or mismanagement of records due to shared names.
While the UG did state that the doctor and patient names are unique, there always exist a possibility that doctors and patients may share the same name as I have seen it before. It will be good to take into account this possibility or it may be considered as overzealous validation. Especially that this is a medical app, preciseness of names are extremely important for official documents and medicine dispense.
how to replicate: add a doctor with same name but different contact details. add-doctor n/Mark Tong p/73920472 e/mt@example.com a/456 Clementi Ave 3 s/Cardiology t/colleague