Storyteller 4.1 and the art of OSS Releases

EDIT: Nice coincidence, there’s a new podcast today with Matthew Groves and I talking about Storyteller we recorded at CodeMash 2017.

Before I introduce the Storyteller 4.1 release, I’ve got to talk about the art of making OSS releases. I admittedly got impatient to get the big Storyteller 4.0 release out the door last month to time it with a trip to my company’s main office. Not quite a month later, I’m having to push Storyteller 4.1 this morning with some key usability changes and some significant bug fixes that make the tool much more usable. Depending on how you want to look at it, I think you can say two different things about my Storyteller 4.0 release:

1. I probably should have dogfooded it longer on my own projects before releasing it and I might have earned Storyteller a bad first impression from some folks.
2. By releasing when I did, I got valuable feedback from early users and a couple significant pull requests fixing issues that I might not have found on my own.

So, was I too hasty or not on releasing 4.0 last month? I’m going to give myself a pass just this one time because the feedback from early adopters was so helpful, but next time I roll out something as big as Storyteller 4 that had to swap out so much of its architecture, I think I’ll do more dogfooding and just kick out early alphas. I’m also in a position where I can drop alpha tools onto some of our internal teams and let them find problems, but I honestly try not to let that happen too much.

Storyteller 4.1

I just pushed a round of Nuget updates for Storyteller 4.1 that added some convenience functionality and quite a few bug fixes, a couple of which were somewhat severe. The new Nugets today include:

1. Storyteller 4.1
2. StorytellerRunnerCsproj 4.1.0.506 (it’s still using my old pre-dotnet cli mechanisms for building Nuget’s within TeamCity builds, if you’re wondering why the version is so different)
3. StorytellerRunner 1.1
4. dotnet-storyteller 1.1
5. dotnet-stdocs 1.0.0

The entire release notes and issues can be found here. The highlights are:

• Storyteller completely disables the file watching on binary files when you’re using Storyteller in the dotnet CLI mode, and it’s been somewhat relaxed in the older AppDomain mode to prevent unnecessary CPU usage. If you’re using the dotnet CLI mode, just know that you have to manually rebuild the underlying system. Fortunately, that can be done at any time in the Storyteller UI with the “ctrl+shift+b” shortcut (suspiciously similar to VS.Net). You can also force a system recycle before running a specification from any specification page with the “ctrl+2” shortcut.
• While we’re still committed to doing a dotnet test adapter for Storyteller when we feel that VS2017 is stable, for the meantime, Storyteller 4.1 introduces a new class called “StorytellerRunner” that you can use to run specifications directly from within your IDE.
• Storyteller can more readily deal with file paths with spaces in the path. Old timers like me still think that’s unnatural, but Storyteller is going to adapt to the world that is here;)
• A new “SimpleSystem” super class for users to more quickly customize system bootstrapping, teardown, and more readily apply actions immediately before or after specification runs.

New Constellation of Storyteller Extensions

All of these are in flight, but a couple are going into early usage this week, so here’s what’s in store in the near future:

1. Storyteller.AspNetCore — new library that allows you to control an ASP.Net Core application from within Storyteller. So far, all it does is handle the application bootstrapping and teardown, but we’re hoping to quickly add some integrated diagnostics to the Storyteller HTML results for HTTP requests. This does use on the “also in flight” Alba project.
2. Storyteller.RDBMS — I talked about it a little here. Right now I’ve tested it against Postgresql and one of my teammates at work is starting to use it against Sql Server this week.
3. Storyteller.Selenium — this is a little farther back on the back burner, but we’re building up a Selenium helper for Storyteller. Lots of folks ask questions about integrating Storyteller and Selenium, so this might move up the priority list.