At present, the Test Team operates with limited active resources, and a significant portion of the workload is handled by a tiny number of contributors. This creates bottlenecks and increases the risk of fatigue for those who remain consistently involved.

Over time, participation patterns within the Test Team have changed. Many past members are no longer actively involved, which reflects the absence of clear long-term participation expectations in earlier years. As a result, previous team members were recognized under practices that did not clearly distinguish between short-term involvement and sustained contribution. These recognitions will be respected, as they were granted under the rules and understanding in place at that time.

Starting in 2026, the Test Team will introduce clearer participation guidelines. Earning “emeritus” status will be based on sustained and consistent contribution over time, rather than short-term or representative involvement alone. New members are expected to remain actively engaged, to the best of their ability, over an extended period.

Towards an easier-to-join but easier-to-leave team

Historically, joining any WordPress team is moderately easy and difficult at the same time.

Mainly there are two ways to join:

1. The easy way: joining as a team representative. There is a window every year if you want to join this way, just for the sake of accomplishment, and you’re good to move on after that year. Many members have nominated themselves to try to witness if, by any chance, they got selected. The sole difficulty of this was the fact that only two members could join (three members in some teams), and in numerous instances, gaining reputation was not even relevant: by manipulating the vote system, some managed to join hideously.

2. The hard way: an extremely rare way, where some members do an epic task and they are recognized as team members for a real merit. Exceptional tasks are things like triaging a couple hundred tickets or managing dozens of meetings, scrubs, or any other activity in the given team. This path is much less common and requires significant dedication and effort, making it the true recognition of commitment and contribution. For the past decade, less than a handful of members have been able to achieve the Test Team role through this method for many reasons, including poor guidelines to clearly help direct efforts.

To address these challenges, we must redefine the criteria for becoming and remaining a Team member, emphasizing sustained contribution and active participation over time rather than just initial entry.

The proposal comes with lowering the barrier for joining “the hard way” but dismissing those “reps” as the sole way to access. We should not forget that representatives are not team leaders; it’s just a shared commitment to support the team over a year-long period. Ideally, already established contributors should be taking this role instead of new members aspiring to get the role just to get the accomplishment or, even worse, the badge.

Lowering the entry barrier will facilitate the access of many more members to the team, but at the same time, new rules should come by to help remove the non-emeritus team members that have not fulfilled a consistent expectation over time. This way we will switch the sense of accomplishment with a sense of duty. Only those that stay for long enough will receive the “emeritus status,” as already introduced, which means preserving the status forever. More details will be commented on in next year’s meetings and further discussed in the Test Handbook GitHub issue tracker.

Announcing: The Test Team Training Program

To support these new guidelines and help members develop the skills needed for meaningful contributions, we are excited to announce the launch of the Test Team Training program. This initiative aims to provide structured learning opportunities and resources to empower both new and existing members to engage more effectively with testing activities.

Starting in January 2026, we will be covering 4 main areas during the 4-week program duration

1. Development of handbook and training resources.
2. Collaboration and communication within the team.
3. Testing fundamentals and best practices.
4. Meetings and scrub management.

Members willing to join the program should be available to invest at least 20 hours during the program’s month (expecting 2-hour live sessions + 3 hours of individual practice per week). “Graduating” will not necessarily warrant a spot on the Test Team but will provide precise guidance on the steps to get there with ease.

Be aware that this is not a mentorship but a guided trainer’s training. Instead, it focuses on equipping participants with precise knowledge and tools to effectively contribute to and support the team’s testing efforts. We may consider future trainings depending on the results. It will be open only to 5 spots. Even though, theoretically, Team members don’t need to be technical for this training, a basic level of technical familiarity (i.e., GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/, WordPress testing workflows, and reading code) is required. In case that there are more spot requests than the 5-cap limit, we will be selecting by technical skill level.

If you have come this far and you want to join, please fill out the following form:

The starting date will probably be the 8th or 15th of January, but it is still pending confirmation. Each of the two one-hour live sessions will most likely be around 3 or 4 PM GMT Tuesdays and Thursdays, and they won’t be recorded.

Props to @nikunj8866, @mosescursor and @sajib1223 for helping review this article and offering feedback.

#core-test, #test-contributors, #training