> They start writing tests because the teacher said they had to.

Wait what, where the fuck did this teacher just pop out from? I thought Bob and Alice wanted to work together on this as a learning opportunity?

Anyway they picked a dumb project. Next time just make it a CLI. Their fault here was thinking "I want to learn X, so I'll build a whole fucking SaaS where the tiniest possible component of that SaaS is X".

Anyway I'll admit that I didn't read beyond that.