Experience within ABN AMRO has shown us that integrating software components is difficult to achieve especially when different departments are responsible for the involved components. Writing good documentation alleviates these problems but frequently the focus is on teams helping each other in getting things working. Within the context of API’s exposed to third parties, this ‘hands on’ approach will not be practical and a focus on the documentation aspect is paramount. The question then becomes how to determine whether the documentation is of sufficient quality and where improvements can be made.

By extensively logging the traffic in our developer sandbox we should get a precise view on how external developers are interacting with our API’s and what problems they run into. This should in turn give us indications which parts of our API documentation and developer portal can be improved. Furthermore we can measure whether these improvements had the desired effect.

Our logging solution provides both quantitative and qualitative data to achieve this. For example by capturing status codes we can measure the average number of calls a developer needs to make in order to get a successful API response. For a more exploratory view we can e.g. look at the progression between subsequent API calls and determine whether specific error messages steer a developer in the direction we intended when we defined the error message.