Google Summer of Code Student 2017

We are happy to anounce that MDAnalysis is hosting a GSoC student for NumFOCUS this year, Utkarsh Bansal (@utkbansal on GitHub), with his project “Port to pytest”.

Utkarsh Bansal: Port unit tests to pytest

Utkarsh will port our complete unit tests from nose to pytest. This is a massive undertaking for MDAnalysis with over 4000 individual tests. But we have great confidence in him and he has started work already to ensure that we don’t have a drop in code coverage during the transition. Newer projects under the MDAnalysis umbrella all use pytests and we are happy to see the switch happening for MDAnalysis as well. Utkarsh will blog continuously during the summer to let you know how far the transition has come and how to best write unit-tests in python.

Utkarsh is currently pursuing a bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering and will be graduating this summer. He hopes to learn new things about python and testing in general this summer and is planning to continue his career as a software developer.

Other NumFOCUS students

NumFOCUS is hosting 12 students this year for several of their supported and affiliated projects. You can find out about the other students here.