Can an API change the world?

Well, there went my weekend.

Recently I stumbled on the Tin Can API (a.k.a. xAPI, a.k.a. Experience API), and decided to devote my Saturday to playing around with it. This post is more about the API than it is about testing, but I promise there’s a test automation component to this story.

Getting it. Or not.

When I first started reading through the first pages of documentation I thought “ok, e-learning. Tin Can API is a RESTful interface for that. Cool. I get it.”. If you’re a developer, you might be thinking along the same lines. It’s easy to imagine how one might put a RESTful API in front of an e-learning system.

Only, I didn’t really get it, and at this moment you probably don’t, either. It is so much more than just a RESTful interface to an e-learning system.

The tin can API is a new standard, meant to be the successor to SCORM. I had never heard of SCORM before, so that didn’t mean a whole lot to me. Fortunately, scorm.com provides a free non-commercial trial of ScormCloud that includes support for the tin can API, so it looks like it should be easy to write some simple experiments. I love free trials of web services.

The webinar black hole

I created a ScormCloud account, and then started reading some of the API docs and drilling deeper into the Tin Can API home page. As I was poking around I came across a podcast titled The Impacts of the Tin Can API: How 8 Companies are Using the Tin Can API (xAPI). Not big on marketing webinars but curious about how the tin can API is being used, I clicked play.

Big mistake. That video threw a real monkey wrench into my hacking plans. I was so blown away by the stories, all I could do was let my mind wander and wonder about all of the possibilities. There were more videos on the same page, and the next thing I know, several hours had gone by. I was stoked.

Working code, in the time it takes to bake a pizza

I was also hungry. It was lunchtime. I’m a programmer, so… pizza! I popped a frozen pizza in the oven, came back to my desk, and figuratively rolled up my sleeves. I really didn’t want the day to pass without writing some code, even though the videos were really fascinating.

Since my current gig has me writing software for automated testing, I figured I could start there. We use a tool called Robot framework which has a feature where I can supply python functions that it will call each time a test suite or test case finishes. Since there’s a python client library for the API, perhaps I can save test results to my StormCloud account.

Literally in the time it took my pizza to cook (18 minutes) I had working code that would take a test case or test suite result and stream messages (“statements” in xAPI terminology) to my StormCloud LRS (Learning Record Store) as the test was running. 18 minutes from never having written a single line of tin can API code to having a working solution. That rocks.

Can I use it in the real world?

Now, why would I want to save test results to a LRS? I don’t know, I probably don’t want to use an LRS to just monitor test results. However, I can think of two related use cases right off the top of my head that are intriguing.

I work for a public company, and when new code is published to our production systems we have some compliance hoops we need to jump through to prove our software was properly tested. Imagine if our deployment process including using the tin can API to record which parts of the application were tested, when, and by whom, during the final deployment? That might be very useful, and I’m guessing it would be relatively easy to implement.

Another area where it might be useful is in the on-boarding and training of our automated test engineers. We have a lot of self-guided exercises and wiki pages, but we rely mostly on the honor system as to whether someone worked through the exercises or not. Imagine capturing which wiki pages they read and which exercises they ran, and compare that to which (if any) tests they were able to run? This would allow us to track their performance, and to fine tune our training strategies based on which exercises yielded the most positive results. This could help both the trainer and trainee.

Getting usage information

Finally, I’m thinking maybe I could bake this into my robot framework extension for the brackets editor. I could use the API to find out which features users are using the most, and if any features are going completely unused.

Tip of the iceburg

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Not even that – it’s an ice cube in a glass of tea that is sitting on the tip of an ice berg. The possibilities really do seem endless. The videos showed me where the tin can api was used in a childrens museum, on a firing range with US soldiers, in mobile apps, websites, gamification, compliance, and the list goes on.