The WordPress Core Test Team has published its “First Quality Analysis Report”, following six months of work within the contribution ecosystem and three months of data related to the 6.8 release cycle.
The findings reveal a disconnect between testing efforts and their implementation in Core. From April 15 to July 15, the Test team submitted 366 test reports, contributed by 58 testers. Yet, only 8% of those reports were reflected in actual Core commits. In addition, nearly 60% of commits were merged without manual testing, suggesting that much of the Test team’s work is going underutilized.
“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.…..”
Test Teams Contributions Underused in Core
Based on the percentage of test reports that were committed to the Core, the analysis report highlights, “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.…..”
These findings suggest that much of the Test Team’s work is going underutilized, as the report states, “ 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.”
The report also notes that only a small fraction of commiters making more than three commits during the analysis period, “ 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.”
It also calls for improved coordination and communication between the Core and Test teams, highlighting a need to better align testing efforts with development workflow, “ This report calls for prompt attention to bridge the communication gap and better integrate testing efforts into the development workflow…. A poor communication line exists between Core and Test teams, and this translates to this disconnection we have found in the present analysis.”
Key Findings from WordPress 6.8 Cycle
The report included an analysis of all the commits made in the WordPress 6.8 cycle, dating from 15th April 2025 to 15th of July 2025. Based on the analysis, the commits were grouped into two categories, “Improvement Commits” and “Chores”.
The findings revealed that during this three month period of the release cycle, there were 217 commits of which only 52 were classified as “Improvement Commits,” and of those, only 29 had any testing associated with them.
The report proceeds to explain the Quality Score and how it is calculated. As highlighted, “ 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…”
Based on it each commit is assigned a score, with 5 being the maximum. The report revealed that the average score was 2.47 out of 5, as highlighted, “The Average Quality Score for all Improvements is 2.47 out of 5.”
With new initiatives expected to follow, the report invites input from Core contributors to help shape a more aligned and effective quality workflow.