This first assignment helped to demonstrate to our team the benefits of test driven development. Our assignment was to create an application that could be tested using the Py.test framework. This Framework allows you to make testing assertions in order to test the functionality of a program using a TDD approach. This type of assignment was very well structured for a TDD approach. The functions that we needed to implement were all given to us before hand and everything was well defined enough for us to know what were should expect for each part of the program.
Using TDD actually helped a lot more than we were expecting with this project. While the functions that we developed worked with basic inputs given by a user, creating a test file made it really easy to try out a lot of different types of inputs fairly easily. Because of this, we branched out more on what kinds of inputs we were giving the program and found that the functions couldn't handle a lot of the data types were were throwing at it. The test file helped us build a more robust program than we initially thought we would need.
The testing also allowed us to find a bug that seemed very strange to us at first when we were testing the regex of the email verifier. We did not realize that the "." character in our test was actually a symbol tha represented any character. We wrongly assumed the character was taken in as a literal because all tests run before passed without an issue. These types of small bugs were much easier to catch when the entire program is being developed with a big focus on testing.