Storyline under a Microscope: An update from the CTO

Welcome to the June 2023 “State of Storyline” update. This month I’d like to touch on our application error rate, customer reported issues, and pre-release quality assurance as well as share our progress on creating a 64-bit version of Storyline 360.

Application Error Rate

In Update 76 of Storyline 360 we addressed 12 of the errors most commonly encountered by users. These errors affected areas such as rendering audio waveforms on the timeline, encoding video, and writing files to disk at publish time. 

Update 76 was released at the end of May and we’re currently monitoring our error reports as Storyline 360 users adopt the update. It typically takes 4 weeks for a new Storyline 360 version to be adopted widely enough to gather useful insights from this data, so we’ll share the impact these fixes had on our metrics in next month’s update.

Customer Reported Issues

Over the last month we have continued prioritizing bugs affecting 5 or more customer accounts. When last month’s update was published we were tracking 39 such bugs. Update 76 of Storyline 360 addressed 17 of these affecting areas such as text entry word wrapping behavior, hyperlinks in animated text, and importing tables from PowerPoint presentations.

We also addressed several other bugs that did not meet the criteria of impacting 5 or more customer accounts but were clearly still causing customer pain. These bugs affected areas like the new Background Audio feature, the Storyline 360 window failing to restore after being minimized, and the timeline play/pause/stop buttons becoming disabled unpredictably. 

As of this writing we are tracking 23 bugs affecting 5 or more customer accounts and remain committed to continuing this work until they are resolved. 

Pre-release Quality Assurance

We’ve continued making changes to our test and release cycles in an effort to improve the quality of each Storyline 360 release. This month I want to highlight a couple of areas that we’ve been focusing on recently:

• Release Validation: New versions of Storyline 360 are released on a monthly basis, which means we typically work in 4 week release cycles. In the past, some portion of the Storyline 360 engineering team would spend the last week of each release cycle testing and validating the new version to ensure it’s ready for release. As we’ve taken a critical look at how we approach quality in Storyline it has quickly become clear that having only a portion of the team participate in this release validation effort is not adequate. Starting with Update 76 of Storyline 360 we’ve had the entire team work together on pre-release validation. Having the whole team participate will not only help us catch more issues prior to release, but will also have us working with the application from a customer perspective more frequently. We’ve found that using Storyline in a manner similar to our customers helps us uncover minor bugs and usability issues that don’t tend to get a lot of attention through the normal bug triage and prioritization process.
• Test Automation: We employ a suite of automated tests to continuously validate the stability of the Storyline 360 application. Some of these tests only exercise one specific component of Storyline in isolation, while others run the full application and simulate a user performing common operations. These tests have replaced some of the repetitive manual testing that traditionally had to be done by a person. We’ve recently begun an effort to expand this test suite to better cover the Storyline 360 HTML5 Player application. With such a wide variety of devices, operating systems, and web browsers in use today, ensuring that the HTML5 Player continues to work with all of them can be a time consuming process for us to do manually. We are working to leverage modern testing frameworks and platforms to automate as much of this work as possible so that we can focus on more valuable tasks like reviewing customer bug reports, investigating frequently occurring errors, and finding new ways to improve the product.

64-bit Storyline 360

Over the past month we’ve kicked off the initial engineering work on a 64-bit version of Storyline 360. We’ve completed some of the initial infrastructure work to allow us to build and test a 64-bit version of Storyline 360 internally. We’ve also begun addressing some of the 32-bit third party components that will need to be updated, replaced, or removed. 

Storyline 360 uses a Chromium-based web browser component for functionality like in-app preview, the 360° image editor, and publishing to video. We’ve successfully created a 64-bit version of this component and are working to integrate it into the 64-bit Storyline build.

We have also identified several different strategies for addressing other third party components that enable functionality like screen recording, spell check, and PowerPoint import. We will begin evaluating and implementing these strategies in the coming weeks.

Looking Forward

To close out this month’s update I’d like to share a couple of additional items:

• Storyline Quality Survey: We recently sent out a survey to some of our most prolific  Storyline 360 users to gather feedback on the application’s overall quality. As responses to the survey come in we’ve been reviewing them to find common themes and direct our future efforts to improve and expand the product. I want to express our appreciation for anyone who received the survey and took the time to respond. If you were not among the Storyline 360 users who received an invitation to complete the survey but are interested in participating you can find and complete the survey here: Storyline Quality Survey. We will be following up with respondents in the coming weeks to discuss their specific feedback.
• Storyline 360 Private Beta: I would once again like to extend an invitation to join our private beta program. The beta version of Storyline 360 is updated on a weekly basis and gets new features and bug fixes before the public version. Participants in this program can report bugs or provide feedback directly to the Storyline 360 engineering team. The beta version can also be installed side-by-side with the public one so you don't have to choose one or the other. If you’re interested in participating please e-mail beta@articulate.com and we’ll get you added to the program!