In the summer of 2021, the Test team started meeting again for chats, triage sessions, and scrubs. One of the things that keeps coming up is the need to have clear instructions for testing.

They are scattered across many Make websites, they are not all kept up-to-date with changes in the different environments they mention, they not always link to existing documentation and, in some cases, they link to pages that no longer exist.

This makes it more difficult for new contributors to join the sessions and actively participate in the team initiatives.

During one of the meetings, the attendees agreed that having good documentation is a priority to welcome new contributors.

Goals

1. Make sure all testing instructions for the most commonly used environments used to test WordPress CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. are updated and unified, across the Make websites.
2. Review the existing Test team handbook: edit, remove and add pages.

Process

At this stage, I am focusing on the first goal: review the testing instructions, simplify if possible, and make sure they are all up-to-date.

The process I have in mind is:

1. Create a spreadsheet with all the pages that mention testing in the:
   1. Make Hanbooks for: AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), Core, Design, Test
   2. wordpress-develop
   3. TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.
2. Post in the team-reps SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. Channel a call for volunteers, so all teams involved can coordinate
3. Create or edit instructions for each environment and cross-link if necessary.
4. Update people in the team-reps every X weeks about the progress done (to be decided with the group of volunteers that will work on this initiative).
5. Future > Act swiftly when something changes, so ideally instructions are never out of date. This is quite hard without version control in our handbooks, but we’ll cross this bridge when we get here 😉

Here is the spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D4Q2_P_FriSxj19P2HIso81s2SZf5RcUVFaTUe12cuk/edit?usp=sharing

Then we can move on to goal number 2 (or another group of people can work on that simultaneously).

Wanna help? Comment in this blog post with your Slack username and we can start working 🙂

Thank you!

Props to @hellofromtonya and @mai21 for peer review.

#build-test-tools, #docs