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Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) of tumor samples to find somatic variants that explain cancer biology is becoming increasingly common, but data obtained by different research groups can be difficult to compare. The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) has now assessed different aspects of WGS experiments and recommends PCR-free library construction and a sequencing depth of ∼100× for these studies. In addition, the ICGC developed benchmarking data sets—manually curated single-nucleotide variants and insertion/deletions from tumor-normal pairs sequenced to ∼300×—to test somatic mutation–calling pipelines. The consortium showed that their benchmark data can improve the quality of pipelines by optimizing the combination of read mapper and variant caller used, but they also stress that further improvements are needed before WGS can be adopted for clinical use.