Testing: Let's Practice!
Suppose we have a program that takes a name and phone number as input. It isn't practical to test every single possible input. What are some inputs you would definitely want to test?
Well, to start, I would test it on my own name and phone number!
That's as good a starting test as any! Checking the behavior on an input you understand very well, and that you think will match all of your assumptions, can be a great starting point.
But while it's fine to have a test like that, it's definitely not enough!
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For sure. What else should we test?
Some people might enter their phone number with dashes between the numbers, and other people might enter it with just the numbers.
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Yep. We should probably make sure the program does the right thing with both.
What if someone misses a number in their phone number?
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Good point! We probably want to check the program's behavior if there's an input error like that!
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Similarly, we should check names that are entered with capital letters and names that are entered in all lowercase!
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Ooh! And names that aren't written in Latin characters at all!
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You're getting the idea!
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Other tests might depend on what, exactly, the program is doing with the name and phone number.
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But thinking about what the edge cases are where the program might behave differently than we want, will serve us well on all sorts of testing.
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We'll revisit this idea when we start writing our own classes in C++.
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