The importance of testing early and often

This week saw the release of WordPress 5.8 ‘Tatum’. It’s a huge milestone on the full site editing journey, the new WordPress experience’s grand adventure. With every release comes a pause, a moment to reflect, yet it’s important to consider testing continually.

We all create this experience together by testing and finding the problems, the edges, collectively. That’s by writing posts, creating themes, building plugins and shaking the code. Boundaries are found by pushing them, not by observing them from afar. Calls for testing often feel tied to release points; I think seeing them as daily, weekly practice is important. They also are trying to replicate real; nothing can truly take the place of using frequently.

When someone talks about testing, it often can feel epic, hard to make time for or a gigantic mountain you have no idea how to climb. Testing, though, is simply often using. That’s a large part of my motivation for creating this site, learning how the editor provides for themes and exploring. Most times, as I venture, I will find bugs, create issues and report things. I am testing by doing, reporting by a discovery – that’s one of the most useful forms of testing anyone can do. You don’t get more real-world than this type of testing.

I would encourage everyone who has an interest in this space to challenge themselves to use the editor more, if they don’t want to make a theme or a plugin, write more, perhaps learn to create a pattern or even see how far you can get using trying on other’s full site editing themes. Make it a weekly habit to try something new in the space. A new theme, a new plugin, a new way of creating using the design tools, perhaps using a different core block you’ve not before. Each time you do this, you’ll likely find hitches or bugs, and there’s a whole amazing group of people ready, willing and able to fix those, so don’t forget to report those issues.