Households Only Allow One Contact Number

[ZaydM18]

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Use the add or edit command.
2. Attempt to add or edit multiple contact numbers into a household.

Expected: Allows command to go through or informs users of other ways to add this information (perhaps through a note).
Actual: Standard invalid 'Contact' error message.

Explanation: As the app focuses on household management for social workers, it is relevant to allow multiple family members' phone numbers, for example in the case of elderly parents and an adult child who lives with them, it would be better to allow multiple phone numbers in case the main person listed in the app is not available for any reason. This does not seem reasonably difficult to implement, and should have been allowed or specifically addressed, at the very least.

[nus-se-script]

[IMPORTANT!: Please do not edit or reply to this comment using the GitHub UI. You can respond to it using CATcher during the next phase of the PE]

Team's Response

This is a fair point, which we will consider for future enhancements. However, given that this phone number field functionality is meant for social workers to contact a household to schedule sessions, and not an emergency contact where having multiple contacts is necessary to ensure the social worker can get through to the family (emergency contact is not necessarily the function of a social worker), we believe that this addition is out of scope for the project.

Thank you for your insightful feedback.

The 'Original' Bug

[The team marked this bug as a duplicate of the following bug]

Overzealous Input Validation for phone numbers

A useful phone number field that could be added to a household could be:

p/6222222(Home) 91231234(Mum)

For example, run the command:

add n/Chan family a/123 Example Road p/6222222(Home) 91231234(Mum)

However, the program prevents us from adding it in.

The phone number field is not being used anywhere else in the program and hence has no need to follow a specific format and therefore, blocking this input does not add any value, whereas adding it in would have allowed me to use the phone number field to store multiple contact numbers for the same household.

Furthermore, most social workers will likely have to keep multiple phone numbers for the same household in case one of those numbers are uncontactable in an emergency.

If the phone number does not follow the format and is hence likely to be invalid, a warning can be shown to the user, instead of outright blocking this input.

However, I do believe that checking for the format is a good feature to prevent mistakes! But this would be more helpful as a warning, as mentioned in the textbook.

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_{[original: nus-cs2103-AY2425S2/pe-interim#604] [original labels: severity.Low type.FeatureFlaw]}

Their Response to the 'Original' Bug

[This is the team's response to the above 'original' bug]

"The phone number field is not being used anywhere else in the program and hence has no need to follow a specific format and therefore, blocking this input does not add any value"- Despite it not being used anywhere, the team believes that input validation should be done regardless as it might be considered good practice.

"Furthermore, most social workers will likely have to keep multiple phone numbers for the same household in case one of those numbers are uncontactable in an emergency." This is a fair point, which we will consider for future enhancements. However, given that this phone number field functionality is meant for social workers to contact a household to schedule sessions, and not an emergency contact where having multiple contacts is necessary to ensure the social worker can get through to the family (emergency contact is not the function of a social worker), we believe that this addition is out of scope for the project.

Thank you for your insightful feedback.

Items for the Tester to Verify

❓ Issue duplicate status

Team chose to mark this issue as a duplicate of another issue (as explained in the Team's response above)

• I disagree

Reason for disagreement: [replace this with your explanation]

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❓ Issue response

Team chose [response.NotInScope]

• I disagree

Reason for disagreement: I do not believe this is out of scope for two reasons. First, this has been addressed as a potential Feature Flaw on the CS2103T website where it states:

Second, the argument that social workers may not need emergency contacts is not entirely accurate. Many social workers work with households that deal with a variety of issues (sick individuals, cases of violence and more) where it may be necessary to keep a list of backup emergency contacts. Moreover, even if such a situation were not necessary, many social workers may still elect to keep multiple contact numbers to arrange sessions. For example, they may choose to keep the numbers of both the husband and the wife of a two-person family (couple).

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❓ Issue severity

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

• I disagree

Reason for disagreement: The reason I noted this as a severity.Medium is twofold as well. 1. For emergency situations. Although the dev team has claimed that social workers will not need to handle emergency contacts because they are only scheduling sessions, the reality is that many social workers work with families that may need this extra layer of assistance (as mentioned earlier, sick individuals or cases of violence and otherwise) where keeping this information may be more pressing. 2. This will affect more than a few users if they simply wish to keep the contact information of multiple family members in the same household. This seems reasonable given that social workers, in this context, are assigned to entire families usually and may attempt to input more than one person's contact information.

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