Hi preCICE community!
My name is Bhavana Praneeth, and I’m a CSE undergrad in his per final year from India interested in contributing to preCICE through Google Summer of Code 2026, specifically focusing on the “System tests improvements” project.
About me: I’m passionate about CI/CD infrastructure, containerization, and reliable software automation. I’m comfortable with Python, Bash, and C/C++. I also bring hands-on experience in shipping products to production, utilizing Docker, AWS ECS/ECR, parallel processing, and setting up automated CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
What motivates me: preCICE’s ability to couple independent solvers is incredible, but validating these complex ecosystems requires robust, fast, and clear system tests. Optimizing the Docker and GitHub Actions workflows to run faster, execute in parallel, and provide clearer error contexts means less waiting and debugging for the maintainers and the research groups relying on this tool. That infrastructure impact is what excites me most.
What I’ve already done:
-
Set up the local development environment and reviewed the
README.mdand contribution guidelines. -
Familiarized myself with the system tests architecture, including the Docker container setups and GitHub Actions CI workflows.
-
Successfully raised my first Pull Request in the tutorials repository: PR #717.
My questions for the mentors:
-
What are the biggest bottlenecks in the current system tests—as i review the issue most of the issue are related the docker template build and path , but i would like to have more information on the github action for your repo where can i find them?
-
Are there specific test cases or repositories you recommend I look into first to understand how the numerical results are currently being validated against the references?