In addition to testing the intrinsic functionality and performance of your publication in the usual way it is obviously important to also test the SCORM performance.
You may be working for a customer who is using a third party LMS. You may not be allowed access to the LMS – the network may be private or the LMS provider may prefer to upload material themselves. Often your uploaded course has to be integrated into a course and then made available via a catalogue and thus involves some additional work. It can therefore be frustrating for all concerned to keep having to repeat this process o the more you can get right from the beginning the better.
There are a couple of programs provided by ADL which help with this process even when you do not have access to an LMS.
Firstly, there is a test suite available from ADL which allows you to test various aspects of SCORM compatibility. This is a Conformance Test Suite which will simply review your SCO and/or the manifest to ensure that it is conformant.
Secondly, there is also a Sample Run Time Environment which mimics an LMS so that you can import your SCO and run as a user would.
These test programs can be downloaded freely from www.adlnet.gov. They require java to be installed. We would strongly recommend testing your publication in the test suite at least.
You can use the Conformance Test Suite to check that your published Opus publication meets the specification and also that the manifest meets the specification.
To test the publication itself Browse for the HTML wrapper created for your publication.
To test the manifest, Browse for the imsmanifest.xml
To test Content Aggregation compliance browse for the ZIP file.
The Test Suite can produce a log of the compliance testing and this can be useful to provide to your client as indication that the material is SCORM-conformant.
There is also a Sample Run Time environment which can also be downloaded. This simulates an LMS and allows you to import your content into it and test how it works without access to a real world LMS.
In practice we have found the occasional variation between this and real world LMS which means it is far from definitive but it is useful for highlighting major errors.
The environment lets you log on as administrator and give your course a title. Then select your final .zip file (the content package) to import into the LMS. You can then run this course as a real-world user would.