Forum Discussion
Storyline under a Microscope: An update from the CTO
Over the past three weeks, the engineering team put Storyline under a microscope. We dug into bugs, dug into our data, and heard a ton of direct feedback to sharpen our interpretation of where thing...
A Year of Change: Reflecting on 12 months of Storyline development
Since stepping into the CTO role at Articulate in early 2023, I've had the privilege of diving deep into our customer experiences. Back then, it quickly became clear that while there was a lot of love for Storyline, there were valid frustrations around unresolved bugs, lack of transparency, missing 64-bit support, and insufficient communication from our engineering team.
Hearing you loud and clear
About a year ago, your feedback was unmistakable: we needed to listen better. I shared our engineering teams’ commitment to change in a post titled, “Storyline under a Microscope: An update from the CTO”, and I'm thrilled to talk about the strides we've made since.
Our Shift in Focus
Today, our conversations with customers are future-focused, revolving around quality, advanced capabilities, and accessibility. It’s a shift from frustration to anticipation, and while we haven’t solved every issue, the progress is undeniable. So let’s review the key themes from the past year and highlight the progress we made on the journey.
Reflecting on Key Themes: Quality, Transparency, and Communication
Quality became focus number one for our team. In a nutshell, we hit pause on all new features to zero in on fixing existing issues, aligning our teams more closely for better quality control, diving into real customer scenarios to guide our releases, and doubling down on modernizing Storyline, including launching a 64-bit version in beta. In more detail:
- Prioritizing Quality Over Features: We took a strategic pause on developing new features for Storyline for six months, dedicating this period solely to enhancing product quality. The entire Storyline Engineering Team shifted their focus to addressing and resolving existing quality issues, ensuring a stronger foundation for our product.
- Unifying our Approach for Better Results: Previously, our Engineering, Quality Assurance, and Support teams worked independently on Storyline releases, which sometimes led to siloed efforts. We've since revamped our approach, bringing these teams into a cohesive unit. This collaboration ensures we can identify and address quality issues more efficiently, resulting in faster and more effective solutions.
- Learning Directly From User Experiences: In partnership with David Anderson, our Director of Customer Training, we've integrated real-world course-building scenarios into our testing process. These scenarios, reflective of our customers' daily challenges, are now a crucial part of validating each Storyline update before it goes live. This practice has not only improved our issue detection but has also deepened our understanding of what our users truly need.
- Modernizing Storyline: A year ago, we reinforced our commitment to Storyline by launching the first 64-bit version, Storyline 360 x64, in a public beta. We're now in the final stages of preparing Storyline 360 x64 for widespread release and are actively working on additional modernization projects to ensure Storyline continues to meet the evolving needs of our users.
Along with our investment in quality, we recognized the need to increase transparency to clarify how we make decisions around what we work on.
Commitment to Transparency
Starting last year we committed to being more transparent about how we approach building and maintaining Storyline. We opened up about our decision-making process, our progress toward reducing unexpected errors, and our plans for addressing long-standing bugs. Our revamped bug triage process ensures we're responsive and focused on what matters most.
- Reducing the error rate: When we started this effort in April of 2023, about 3% of Storyline sessions were encountering an unexpected error. We committed to getting this metric under 1%. As of March 1, 2024 1.2% of Storyline sessions are encountering an unexpected error. We’ve worked hard to reduce these errors and we won’t stop until we get under our 1% goal because any error that interrupts your day is like a “paper cut” in your way.
- Staying “below five”: Twelve months ago, we discovered we had stopped paying attention to “older bugs”. So we focused our attention on not just recent issues but all bugs that had five customers or more. We have 100s of thousands of users, and set a line in the sand that all bugs must stay “below five customers” otherwise we stop feature development to fix. We cleaned up our backlog of bugs affecting five or more customers and Storyline is much stronger for it.
- Revamping our bug triage process: Our bug database was, admittedly, a bit of a mess in April of 2023 and it was difficult to find signal in the noise. The right things were not always getting prioritized. So along with jumping on those older bugs, we revamped our daily bug triage approach to prioritize new bugs in the latest releases. We also started tracking the overall defect rate coming in from support cases to drive it below 10%. These changes helped us jump on issues causing pain quickly so that it didn’t spread.
To reinforce our quality and transparency commitment, we recognized the need to increase communications to ensure your concerns were being heard and addressed.
Emphasis on continuous communication
In summary, monthly updates last year have kept you informed. We’ve increased our engagement with you through direct conversations and expanded our beta program, ensuring your voice is heard and valued.
- Monthly updates from Engineering leadership: Storyline’s engineering leader, Jesse Taber, provided monthly “State of Storyline” updates as comments on my original E-Learning Heroes post. In Jesse’s final update in September 2023 after we took Storyline out of Code Red, he committed to continue providing updates on a quarterly basis.
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- The first quarterly Storyline quality update is now available.
As a bonus, Jesse also wrote a separate article all about 64-bit Storyline.
- The first quarterly Storyline quality update is now available.
- Commitment to working directly with you: We spoke with a lot of customers last year to learn about their experiences using Storyline 360 and have made that a regular practice. The insights from those conversations are invaluable. We also expanded participation in our private beta program by 55%! We love working directly with our private beta customers to gather feedback about new features and hear about issues. If you’re interested in a more direct line to our engineering team, please e-mail beta@articulate.com.
Looking Forward
As we move forward, balancing innovation with quality remains our unwavering commitment. Vanessa Fage, leading our Storyline quality team and beta program, is a testament to our dedication to continuous improvement and open communication.
A Year of Collaboration
This journey has reinforced the value of working directly with you, a lesson we'll carry forward to ensure we never stop listening again. Your trust fuels our progress, and for that, we’re profoundly grateful.
Thank you for inspiring us and for being a pivotal part of Storyline's evolution.
Welcome to the July 2023 “State of Storyline” update. When we began to focus on quality earlier this year we defined some key metrics to measure the overall stability and quality of Storyline. This month I’d like to share details about some of those metrics and the progress we’ve made in improving them over the past several months
Application Error Rate
The application error rate metric is based on how often Storyline displays the “Articulate Storyline Error Report” dialog. We track and report on this data in two ways:
- Session Application Error Rate: % of Storyline sessions that encounter the error report dialog at least once per release
- User Application Error Rate: % of Storyline users that encounter the error report dialog at least once per release
In April of 2023, our application error rates were ~3% for Storyline sessions and ~30% for Storyline users. Several weeks after shipping the Update 75 release of Storyline we saw these numbers decline, but unfortunately, Microsoft released a Windows Update in late March that could cause intermittent issues when publishing Storyline projects. The rollout of this Windows Update coincided with the adoption of Update 75 which led to an inflated application error rate for that release. We added some additional error handling to mitigate this problem in Update 76, but the core issue was in the Windows operating system itself so we were unable to resolve it completely. Last month Microsoft released a fix for this issue, and we are now seeing improved error rate metrics. Here are the error rates for the past three Storyline releases:
|
Update Number |
Release Date |
Session Rate |
User Rate |
|
75 |
April 18, 2023 |
3% |
31% |
|
76 |
May 30, 2023 |
2.6% |
22% |
|
77 |
June 20, 2023 |
1.8% |
14% |
This trend is very encouraging and we will continue working to drive both of these error rates under 1% in future releases.
Customer Reported Issues
Earlier this year we established a goal of addressing all bugs that are impacting 5 or more customer accounts. Here is a breakdown of the bugs we’ve fixed and the number of customers that were affected by them over the past three releases:
|
Update Number |
Release Date |
Bugs Fixed |
Affected Customers |
|
75 |
April 18, 2023 |
16 |
200 |
|
76 |
May 30, 2023 |
33 |
506 |
|
77 |
June 20, 2023 |
23 |
312 |
- In the last 3 months, we fixed 72 bugs affecting over 1,000 customers.
- For contrast, in the first 3 months of the year, we fixed a total of 41 bugs affecting just over 500 customers.
We are currently tracking 21 bugs impacting 5 or more customers and will continue to prioritize fixing those along with others that are causing customer pain.
Downgrades
Last year we started tracking how often Storyline 360 users upgrade to a new version of the software and then later downgrade to an earlier version. Because the adoption rate for new Storyline 360 releases is very consistent, we use downgrade frequency as a way to measure stability.
We established a goal to maintain the number of downgrades for each Storyline 360 release at less than 1% of the total number of new installs and upgrades. Here is a breakdown of the downgrade percentages for each release in 2023:
|
Update Number |
Release Date |
Downgrade % |
|
72 |
January 23, 2023 |
2.64% |
|
73 |
February 21, 2023 |
1.99% |
|
74 |
March 21, 2023 |
1.03% |
|
75 |
April 4, 2023 |
0.94% |
|
76 |
May 30, 2023 |
0.82% |
|
77 |
June 20, 2023 |
0.77% |
We interpret the improved downgrade percentage numbers to mean that we’re both shipping more stable software and are able to find and patch issues in new releases quickly. It’s been extremely rewarding for the team to see this metric improve as a result of our focus on quality. We’re very pleased to have reached our goal and will continue monitoring to ensure it remains at this level.
Defect Rate
Customers open support cases for many reasons. Sometimes they need help building a course, other times they may have billing questions, and sometimes they are reporting a bug in the software. The defect rate metric tracks the percentage of open support cases that are associated with an unfixed bug. The lower this number, the better. We snapshot this data on a weekly basis and roll it up into quarterly averages. Our current goal is to keep this metric under 12%.
In Q1 of 2023, our defect rate average was 9.56%. In Q2 we have been able to reduce it to 6.62%. The reduction in the defect rate is a direct result of our focus on both fixing existing bugs and improving our quality processes to reduce the number of new bugs being introduced.
Wrap Up
To close out this month’s update I’d like to share a couple of additional items:
- 64-bit Storyline 360: We recently reached an important milestone: for the first time ever we have 64-bit builds of Storyline 360 available for internal testing and validation! These builds have limited functionality and there is still much more work to be done, but the team has made great progress on this difficult task. We are continuing to update or replace 3rd party components that only work with 32-bit applications and are also updating parts of the Storyline infrastructure to ensure that we can correctly consume low-level Windows APIs in the 64-bit builds. Other remaining work includes creating an installer, updating our internal build and deploy infrastructure, and a lot more testing and validation.
- Storyline 360 Private Beta: I’d like to close out this monthly update by extending an invitation to join our private beta program. The beta version of Storyline 360 is updated weekly with 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!
