Does the Pope have a Dangerous Dog?

That may seem a strange question to ask, but it's one that I remember an IT Project Manager once boasting that their system could answer.  What she meant was that their customer management system could support the data because "His Holiness The Pope" was included in the drop-down list of personal titles and they had a check box to flag customers who had a vicious canine.

The project team in this case had spent a lot of time researching personal titles and come up with a list of several hundred; but while they had included the "Her Majesty The Queen" as well as the Pope, they'd not thought about those people that have composite titles such as "Rev. Dr."  I can state with confidence that this particular company does not count either Her Majesty or His Holiness as customers, but they do have customers with composite titles.

They also recognised that it would be useful for staff to know if a customer's pet might pose a threat should they have cause to visit.  But how exactly did they expect to collect this information in the first place?

It's all very well to try to capture data in a structured way, but why list hundreds of titles when a handful cover the vast majority of the population?  My advice is to list the common ones (Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms, Dr, Rev) and then allow for Others through a free-text field.  Using the list reduces the number of typographical errors made in entering standard titles and the free-text field will allow for anything else to be entered exactly as the customer wants it.

This isn't rocket science, it's just a pragmatic approach to dealing with data entry screens and validation