Open source software suitable for learning testing?

Question

I am working on a little software testing course and I am searching for a good "software guinea pig" to be used as a running example and as a subject for various exercises. The target audience for the course are people with no or very little general technical knowledge. I am searching for something meeting these criteria:

1. Open-source
2. Non-specialist domain (anyone needs to grasp what the app does after a brief explanation)
3. Not intimidating
4. Well-testable: Human-oriented inputs and clear outputs, no complicated internal state
5. Web UI
6. REST APIs under that UI
7. Ideally, nice unit/integration testsuite

Ideally, the software should be deployable to a VM or a container. Does anyone have a good experience with specific software used as a testing subject for learning?

Answer 1

It seems to me that you are aiming for something that is likely too complicated for your audience, as they have no technical knowledge.

From my experience using something like the machines from James Lyndsay is already a big challenge for people to understand 'testing' to begin with.

But there are several places where you might find something of interest:

• test challenges
• another set of test challenges

Answer 2

For website, here's my go-to.

It's got a bit of everything, including some fairly tricky layout to test out one's locator skills.

I do believe there are some REST API under the hood. But I didn't see any publish docs or swagger. You would probably need to use Dev Console to discover them.