In an effort to raise the overall quality of WordPress Core contributions and address long-standing challenges in the contributor workflow, the Test team has officially introduced a new initiative, the Test Contributors Group.
The initiative is based on two feedback sessions held on July 4 and July 18, where current members of the Test Team highlighted several critical areas for improvement. The prominent ones being communication gaps, unclear contribution efforts, and a noticeable decline in committer activity. The group is designed to be open to all contributors regardless of seniority and with a key focus on knowledge sharing and networking.
The Initiative’s Vision
The vision of the new initiative is to ensure that every code contribution is thoroughly vetted and can be merged to the core confidently as stated, “ The vision of this project is to provide such a degree of quality that any committer could be so confident that the code has gone through enough quality checks that it could be ultimately merged blindly and fearlessly.”
The team also identified key flaws in the current workflow, concerning the Report Triaging and Patch Testing. Besides this, the lack of unit tests and Playwright tests was noted, “ Not only to mention that a lack of Unit Tests is one of the main elements that leads to a lower Quality Score (according to the Quality Report). No Playwright tests have been submitted in months, and most of the PHP code commits don’t even have enough Test Coverage.”
Building Expertise and Encouraging Collaboration
The proposal seeks to encourage contributors to focus in individual components of WordPress or Gutenberg, which will further improve their expertise in it as highlighted, “ The proposal that has brought more attention to achieve a new level of Quality to the organization has been the idea of having contributors specializing in one single area or component within WordPress or Gutenberg. This approach aims to deepen expertise, improve efficiency, and enhance the overall quality of contributions within specific domains.”
“ The intention is to organize this group in a flat leadership structure, ensuring maximum autonomy and collaboration among the members.”
The group will operate under a flat leadership model, promoting autonomy and collaboration as stated, “ The intention is to organize this group in a flat leadership structure, ensuring maximum autonomy and collaboration among the members.”
Interested contributors are encouraged to select a Core component to begin with. While Gutenberg contributions are also welcome, the component structure for Gutenberg has to be worked out. The first onboarding session will be on July 25, 2025, and afterwards every Thursday. Once onboarded, contributors will receive support from existing members and are encouraged to share feedback
The initiative is still in its early stages and organizers expect to see initial results in the next 5–6 months and the proposal acknowledges that mastery over the entire WordPress codebase is a tall order but focused expertise is achievable as highlighted, “ We will be in a learning process for long, and maybe, in 5 or 6 months, we might start to see the initial results…..Mastering the whole WordPress codebase is an almost impossible task, but mastering on a full focus is very affordable…”.