The world is a strange place at the moment and rather than talk about all the gloom and doom I wanted to share hopefully a couple of helpful distractions.

Now could be the perfect time whilst we are being asked to self isolate to spend maybe just 30 minutes a day and learn something new or brush up on some old skills perhaps?

Testing Playgrounds

1. The sweet shop is an intentionally broken web application that invites you to explore and brush up on some of your testing skills. Whether you want to try out some DevTools, practice accessibility or perhaps you just want an application to write some UI test automation against.
2. Test Pages For Automating is a set of pages for automating or testing created by Alan Richardson. Some of the examples are suitable for manual exploratory testing or JavaScript hacking. Alan also has created quite a few more games, apps and tools which you may find interesting.
3. The testers playground contains various free challenges designed to help testers learn as well as challenge their current knowledge and skills.
4. Restful-Booker is an API playground created by Mark Winteringham for those wanting to learn more about API testing and tools.
5. Testing Challenges created by Draghia Claudiu contains lots of testing puzzles that you can work through. Challenges range from web testing to completing a crossword puzzle with testing techniques.

Courses

1. Pluralsight are giving people free access to 7,000+ expert-led video courses all month long as part of #FreeApril. This usually costs £24 pounds per month to access these great courses which they are now giving away for free. No catches, no credit card required. They have some really great courses on UI testing, programming fundamentals and also specific things like iOS app testing and testing react applications.
2. TestAutomation University if you haven’t heard about it already, is a great FREE site and initiative setup by Angie Jones of AppliTools where she has world-class industry leaders create some fantastic courses which they make available for free. Again you can learn so many different things like programming fundamentals in Java with Angie Jones, API testing with Postman with Amber Race, Automating in the browser with Alan Richardson as well as so many other things; Visual testing, Cypress… the list goes on - check it out.

We’re all in this together. We're making all of our 7,000+ expert-led video courses FREE for the entire month of April. No catches, no credit card required. https://t.co/S5NVzlWOBZ #FreeApril #StayHome pic.twitter.com/l8X6qWEzLD

— Pluralsight (@pluralsight) April 2, 2020

Books

1. Around the world with 80 software testers is a free book which draws upon the knowledge and experience from both experts and new voices from around the world involved in software testing. The book is free and currently available via LeanPub. The book is 27% complete with new contributions being added every other week.
2. Agile testing days recently tweeted ‘a great list of books every agile tester should read’. Some of these books are free and the rest you can purchase either in physical or in an eFormat.

If you’re into agile software testing, make sure you do not miss out on reading these inspiring books.
📚 Blog Post: https://t.co/1EGkOqQwAZ pic.twitter.com/VjBAZBnAVS

— Agile Testing Days (@AgileTD) March 25, 2020

Have something to share?

I hope the above will provide some helpful distractions for you.

If you have found some helpful distractions, I’d love to hear about them - please feel free to comment.

Stay safe!