Update unit tests to work with asserts enabled

[DakshitBabbar]

Description

This PR solves the Issue #321.

Learning: Unit tests are supposed to be built with asserts enabled during the development process. But when these are built for coverage analysis these should be built with asserts disabled. This is because the lcov tool would consider all the branches in the asserts as uncovered.

This PR:

1. Update the unit tests to work with asserts enabled
2. Update the code to have 100% branch coverage. To achieve this, one branch which was logically unreachable, was excluded from the coverage analysis.
3. Updates the CI checks to build the code with asserts to check if all the unit tests are working as expected. Along with this it will also build the code without asserts to check coverage.
4. Updates the command in the README.md that users should use to build the unit tests. This command has asserts disabled, as asserts are only required during the development process of the unit tests.

Test Steps

The unit tests are building and running successfully with asserts. They also give 100% coverage without asserts.

Checklist:

• I have tested my changes. No regression in existing tests.
• I have modified and/or added unit-tests to cover the code changes in this Pull Request.

Related Issue

#321

By submitting this pull request, I confirm that you can use, modify, copy, and redistribute this contribution, under the terms of your choice.