Quality Insights Toolkit, a testing platform from WooCommerce

It's great to see how automation is utilized to ensure code quality in the WordPress space.

For example, over the years, the WordPress Plugin Review team has shared insights how they use automation in their review process. There are plenty of posts on Make WordPress.org, such as Reducing the Plugin Review Team's Workload through Automation and Automatically Catching Bugs in Plugins, and others.

To make things easy, most of the rules and checks have been bundled in the Plugin Check (PCP) plugin. You don't need any setup to verify your work.

There have also been other initiatives, like Tide, which aimed to "raise the quality of code one plugin or theme at a time by elevating the importance of code quality in the developer consciousness."

Most of these primarily run the WordPress Coding Standards and PHPCompatibilityWP.

Quality Insights Toolkit (QIT)

Outside the Core, there are some interesting initiatives popping up.

There's the the Quality Insights Toolkit (QIT) from WooCommerce, which provides current and prospective extension developers with managed automated tests. Currently, this is limited to the Woo Marketplace, but likely will be avaliable to the public.

This toolkit goes beyond the mentioned tools, PHPCS and PHPCompatibility, and introduces tools and checks that are less known and used in the WordPress space.

It offers E2E and API testing with Playwright, which is extensively used in Gutenberg but is just gaining steam in the core.

Additionally, QIT uses Semgrep and PHPStan for static analysis.

It's worth checking out this initiative and integrating some of the tools they are using in our workflow. There's a good chance they will gradually make their way into the Core over time.

I'm interested in finding out how they use Semgrep and the benefits we can get from it, as that's something I'm currently not using for my work.