Hello,
The MediaWiki core tests are a bit of a mess, tends to be slow and require a working MediaWiki installation.
We could certainly extract tests that exercise a single function and do not depend on having mw installed. Ie unit tests. Doing so, we could have devs and CI run the lightweight/fast unit tests and skip the slow tests, hopefully saving a lot of time.
Another interest, is that the resulting unit tests suite will give us a good overview of our code coverage. We could probably generate a coverage report quite fast tricking people in writing more unit tests to enhance the metric.
I am not sure whom to bring the subject to nor how to get a champion elected to pursue that Augeas cleaning. I am sure MediaWiki Core team will have some good ideas :-]
There is a task https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87781
cheers,
mediawiki-core@lists.wikimedia.org