We currently run all tests on every pull request. This is a good practice because it gives us confidence that our changes won't break anything. The downside of this setup is that even the smallest of pull requests have to run the whole test suite, including changes that don't affect the codebase, like the README or the contributing docs.

Some of our tests are still pretty slow:

[ci skip] won't work

It's common for some projects to support a pattern like [ci skip] that can be added to commit messages to exempt the commit from triggering a new test run, but there are a few problems with that:

1. It's kind of a dangerous pattern that can be abused by someone wishing to hastily jump the queue.
2. We require PR branches to be up to date with the base branch before merging, so we almost always have to "update branch" before merging. This wouldn't skip CI.
3. Our branch protection requires that certain checks pass. If those checks are skipped, the PR will never turn green.

what about detecting changed files?

There are lots of GitHub Actions out there for collecting a list of changed files in a pull request. This looks like a particularly nice one: https://github.com/futuratrepadeira/changed-files#readme

Using such an Action we could conditionally skip certain steps in our test suite. For example, we could skip the content test group if there have not been any changes to content/ or data/. We could also probably skip the links-and-images test in this case too.

The drawback of this approach is that we wouldn't have 100% confidence that every single PR is passing every single test, but I think that might be worth losing in exchange for a faster release cycle. 🚀

cc @github/docs-engineering