The Test Team helps manage testing and triage across the WordPress ecosystem. They focus on user testing of the editing experience and WordPress dashboard, replicating and documenting bug reports, and supporting a culture of review and triage across the project.
Please drop by any time in SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ with questions or to help out.
@agulbra, the main contributor to WordPress TracTracTrac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket #31992 on “Unicode email addresses”, has largely completed the development work but has been testing it himself, which is not ideal. @SirLouen emphasizes the need for independent testing and suggests that @agulbra prepare clear, detailed test cases so both technical and non-technical testers can contribute, aiming for at least three to four independent reports. Potentially during the next Patch Testing Triage next 18 August 2025 at 1.30PM GMT.
7. Test Team Discussion, Questions, and Blockers
Proposal to review the official Test Reports in Trac
The main topic is the proposal to review official Trac Test Reports related to the WordPress CoreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. test team activities. @oglekler and @sirlouen discuss the existence and visibility of three main reports: Needs Testing, Needs Unit Tests and Needs Reproduction (with the last one being less accessible and considered inaccurate).
The proposal is to create specific queries for each report and holding a vote in one of the next official test team meeting to decide which queries should be accepted. The results would then be forwarded to the Core administration team for potential changes, as these reports directly affect the Test Team’s activities.
The overall idea is to formalize the process of selecting and refining these reports through the test team’s official meetings and votes. This process would help maintain effective tracking of testing tasks by having official and accurate reports that reflect the test team’s needs and priorities.
8. Open Floor
No additional topics were brought during the open floor section of the meeting.
Big Enhancement #31992 promoted by @agulbra ready for Milestone 6.9, needs testing.
Questions/Blockers
Reviewing Proposal for the 2 official TracTracTrac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. Test Reports
Open Floor
Got a topic? Add in comments below, or bring it up live during the chat.
Leave a Comment
Do you have something to propose for the agenda?
Can’t make the meeting, but have a question for the Test Team?
If any of the above apply, please leave a comment below.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Week in Test, the place where contributors of any skill level can find opportunities to contribute to WordPress through testing. You can find the Test Team in #core-test.
Here’s a roundup of active tickets that are ready for testing contributions.
Did you know that contributions with the Test Team are also a fantastic way to level up your WordPress knowledge and skill? Dive in to contribute, and gain coveted props 😎 for a coming release.
Reproduction Testing 🔁
Who? Any contributor. Why? It is helpful to show an issue exists for other users to move a ticket forward for patching.
The following new tickets have been reviewed, and need testers to attempt to reproduce the reported issue (aka “repro”), and then provide a reproduction test report with the results:
Who? All contributors (not just developers) who can set up a local testing environment. Why? It is necessary to apply proposed patches and test per the testing instructions to validate that a patch addresses the issue.
The following tickets have been reviewed, and a patch provided, and need testers to apply the patch and manually test, then provide feedback through a patch test report:
Who? Any QA or PHPPHPPHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php developer contributors who can (or are interested in learning how to) build automated PHPUnit tests. Why?Automated tests improve the software development feedback loopLoopThe Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop for quality and backward compatibility.
GutenbergGutenbergThe Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc.
https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ 21.3 has been released and is available for download!
Hello and welcome to another edition of Week in Test, the place where contributors of any skill level can find opportunities to contribute to WordPress through testing. You can find the Test Team in #core-test.
Here’s a roundup of active tickets that are ready for testing contributions.
Did you know that contributions with the Test Team are also a fantastic way to level up your WordPress knowledge and skill? Dive in to contribute, and gain coveted props 😎 for a coming release.
Reproduction Testing 🔁
Who? Any contributor. Why? It is helpful to show an issue exists for other users in order to move a ticket forward for patching.
The following new tickets are awaiting review, and need testers to attempt to reproduce the reported issue (aka “repro”), and then provide a reproduction test report with the results:
Who? All contributors (not just developers) who can set up a local testing environment. Why? It is necessary to apply proposed patches and test per the testing instructions in order to validate that a patch fixes the issue.
The following tickets have been reviewed and a patch provided, and need testers to apply the patch and manually test, then provide feedback through a patch test report:
Who? Any QA or PHPPHPPHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php developer contributors who can (or are interested in learning how to) build automated PHPUnit tests. Why?Automated tests improve the software development feedback loopLoopThe Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop for quality and backward compatibility.
After six months of deep analysis inside the WordPress contribution ecosystem and for 3 months of intensive data collection (more specifically from the 6.8 release), a new light has been drawn over the current state of quality practices in the WP CoreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. project.
WordPress Test team has existed for ages, but for longer, it has always been perceived just as a group of people that simply performed some simple tests on tickets and patches just to triage and separate the wheat from the chaff.
From the start of 2025, as we have grown into a massive test team with more than 50 members, there is a firm decision to prioritize switching from bare testing to a more holistic approach on Quality Assurance, trying to observe all areas that might require attention and trying to find a way to fix them. This is the main reason of why this analysis report has been done.
Commits Data & Classification
Doing a completely manually curated analysis, checking each commit done individually from the release of 6.8 the 15th April until 6.8.2 the 15th of July here we have been able to classify Commits into some categories:
Improvement Commits, which include Bug fixes, Enhancements, Regressions, and New Features (no New Features though), fall into the same group. This is what we call improvement commits, and they need a more detailed analysis than the rest.
Chores, which are any type of task that doesn’t require a lot of in in-depth review, like Docs updates, Code Standards or any sort of automated issue discovery (like phpstan-based commits), Minor Unit Tests updates, version changes and all the other tasks that are mostly designed to maintain the project overall. Also, anything that relates to backporting
Special note about Bundled Themes component, for the whole analysis we have decided to exclude Themes because although it can have some testing, it’s very difficult to add any kind of automated testing so by default it will have a lesser Quality Score which could render results a little unfair compared to the rest of the areas. Maybe another quality specialized report specific for Bundled Themes could be done in the future.
With all this information in mind, here some facts and here is the data.
The commits done in this period sum a total of 217 units.
Total commits done by 17 unique committers.
Improvement commits were made by 14 unique committers.
From those 217 units, only 52 were Improvement Commits.
The total of Tests taken into those Improvements were only 29.
Quality Score Calculation Formula
The Quality Score is calculated based on the presence of automated tests, code reviews, and the amount of manual testing submitted before merging a commit. Each commit has assigned points for these three quality elements, and the total score reflects the overall quality assurance applied:
One point, up to two, per code review.
One point up to two, per manual test.
One extra point if it includes automated tests.
The maximum Quality Score per commit is a total of 5 points. This allowed an affordable classification and at the same time a way to compare results with activities that the Test Team are actually driving. Only commits from the improvements’ categoryCategoryThe 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging. were taken into analysis.
Classification for each commit is shown in the report as follows:
5 points: Outstanding
4 points: Excellent
3 points: Good
2 points: Needs Improvement
1 point: Poor
0 points: Unacceptable
Quality Score Facts
There were no commits with unacceptable level
Unfortunately, there were no commits with outstanding level.
The Average Quality Score for all Improvements is 2.47 out of 5.
Components by Commits
Only components with more than 3 commits show the average Quality Score, to have a minimal sample into account.
Media with 7 commits (3.29 Quality Score).
Build/Test Tools with 5 commits (2.4 Quality Score).
Editor with 4 commits (2.75 Quality Score).
Users with 4 commits (2 Quality Score).
Options/MetaMetaMeta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. APIs with 3 commits (2.67 Quality Score).
Login and Registration with 3 commits (2.33 Quality Score).
Networks and Sites with 2 commits.
Administration with 2 commits.
Posts/Post Types with 2 commits.
Embeds with 2 commits.
And the rest, Query, Rest APIREST APIThe REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”)
https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/, Toolbar, Bootstrap/Load, Site Health, Customize, RevisionsRevisionsThe WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision., Upgrade/Install, Role/Capabilities, TaxonomyTaxonomyA taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies., Application Passwords, Comments, and Database, with only 1 commit
The other top-level components that did not receive a single commit were: Cache APIAPIAn API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways., Cron API, Date/Time, Export, External Libraries, Feeds, Filesystem API, Formatting, General, Help/About, HTMLHTMLHTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. API, HTTPHTTPHTTP is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. API, I18N, Import, Interactivity API, Mail, Permalinks, Plugins, Privacy, Script Loader, Security, Sitemaps, Themes, and XML-RPC.
Test Team Data
Using an LLM for data classification and with some additional double-checking, we have been able to retrieve a list of all the Test Reports performed by the Test Team from the release of 6.8 to the release of 6.8.2. This sum a total of 366 reports made by a total of 58 unique testing contributors. Here is the data.
!!! If I have missed someone in the list, please pingPingThe act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” me and I will update it asap.
Data Analysis
The data suggests there’s a massive chasm between the efforts of the Test team and the extent to which those efforts are being utilised by the Core team. Only around 8% of the test reports appear to be reflected in commits, and nearly 60% of reports seem to be merged without any accompanying manual testing.
This gap highlights a significant underutilization of the Test team’s efforts, and this is what intuitively brought the attention of the Test Team for several months until it was decided to generate such a report with real data to confirm the concerns.
Finally, we can see, that only 8 committers out of 87 committers currently in this list, did more than 3 commits in a 3-month period, showing that barely the 9% of the committer base is active in Core nowadays. Despite the fact that some of them are very active in the GutenbergGutenbergThe Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc.
https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/pluginPluginA plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. repository, we are only analysing the status of Core in this report.
Future Directions
This report calls for prompt attention to bridge the communication gap and better integrate testing efforts into the development workflow, given the extremely low resources that we count in Core nowadays.
Test team, on the opposite, has demonstrated to have enough capacity to provide results and, at the same time, but without some sort of guidance it seems that all efforts are being misdirected and, unfortunately, are providing minimal to no value. A poor communication line exists between Core and Test teams, and this translates to this disconnection we have found in the present analysis.
We recommend staying tuned to this blog because new projects will arise soon trying to help target the right aspects to improve the overall quality of the project, but at the same time, the Test Team will need to discover a simple way to open a communication channel with Core and find out which are the exact priorities that should be undertaken in every moment.
Here is where, if any Core Team member is reading this, please write your thoughts in the comments, and we will be grateful to read through them and work on consolidating all ideas.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Week in Test, the place where contributors of any skill level can find opportunities to contribute to WordPress through testing. You can find the Test Team in #core-test.
Here’s a roundup of active tickets that are ready for testing contributions.
Did you know that contributions with the Test Team are also a fantastic way to level up your WordPress knowledge and skill? Dive in to contribute, and gain coveted props 😎 for a coming release.
Reproduction Testing 🔁
Who? Any contributor. Why? It is helpful to show an issue exists for other users in order to move a ticket forward for patching.
The following new tickets are awaiting review, and need testers to attempt to reproduce the reported issue (aka “repro”), and then provide a reproduction test report with the results:
Who? All contributors (not just developers) who can set up a local testing environment. Why? It is necessary to apply proposed patches and test per the testing instructions in order to validate that a patch fixes the issue.
The following tickets have been reviewed and a patch provided, and need testers to apply the patch and manually test, then provide feedback through a patch test report:
Who? Any QA or PHPPHPPHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php developer contributors who can (or are interested in learning how to) build automated PHPUnit tests. Why?Automated tests improve the software development feedback loopLoopThe Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop for quality and backward compatibility.
To make the most of this event, we’re looking for 2–3 experienced Test Team contributors to serve as Table Leads onsite and remote.
What does a Test Table Lead do? You’ll welcome new contributors, introduce them to Make Test, guide them through available resources, and create an open, supportive space for collaboration. More details can be found in the Test Table Leads section of the handbook.
Interested in helping out?
Don’t feel like leading but still want to help? That’s just as valuable! Your presence whether onsite or online; can go a long way in making new contributors feel welcome and supported.
Whether you’d like to lead or just be available to support new contributors (in person or online), we’d love to hear from you!
Let’s make WCUS Contributor Day 2025 a day of learning, connection, and impact! Will you be part of the Test Table crew? Feel free to drop a commentbelow in this post, or reach out in #core-test, or DM @krupajnanda or @oglekler to express interest. We are here to guide you.🙇♀️
Props to @oglekler for pre-publish review of this post! 🙇♀️
@sirlouen gave an update on the WordPress 6.8.2 Maintenance Release, specifically noting that the final quality review is still in progress and additional reviewers are welcome. He acknowledged that the review is taking a bit longer than expected due to the volume of data being processed. When @krupajnanda asked about the scope of the quality review, he clarified that it involves analyzing detailed test results and tables he previously shared in an earlier round table(RT) meeting.
In support of this effort, SirLouen also referred to the “A Month in Core – June 2025” update, showcasing contribution data. He highlighted concerns between the efforts of the Test Team in coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. contributions. This gap, backed by real data, will be further explored to help guide improvement and collaboration across teams.
@sirlouen also shared that he is planning to have zoom call with fellow contributors on the PHPStan proposal on this Friday, July 18 at 1 PM GMT / 3 PM CET / 6:30 PM IST. The goal of this call is to walk interested contributors through the current proposal, explore how they can get involved, and discuss some of the early feedback and ideas. This session will be conducted over a Zoom. @krupajnanda has requested to prepare the agenda and summary(after the meeting) post for the same.
During the discussion, we emphasized the importance of transparency and structure for any upcoming contributor focused calls. @krupajnanda suggested creating an agenda or call-out post similar to how team chats are managed. So contributors clearly understand the purpose, the topics to be covered, and who the call is aimed at (e.g., developers, QA, etc.). This would help set expectations, offer clarity, and encourage meaningful participation.
@krupajnanda mentioned that this approach would help us stay on track during meetings and @oglekler also acknowledged that if we doing anything within the community space then it should be done in community-friendly and transparent way.
