2.2 What Advantages Does This Bring to the Developer?

   

Forget the fact that you are a test engineer, scientist, or production engineer; you are being asked to develop software. Go on, call yourself a software engineer. How much time do you spend developing software per week? The additional productivity that LabVIEW brings is a bonus, but it's not the whole story.

Before we talk about everything else let's linger on productivity a bit longer. This is more than just building software quicker and cheaper, it's about opening up new areas of business, making bespoke software available where it was previously too expensive. Developing quicker allows you to react to changing requirements quicker. This gives the advantage of being at least in step with your customer and, in some cases, even ahead. There aren't many languages where you can say that!

The story about the ugly program discussed earlier highlights another advantage of LabVIEW: maintainability. In traditional languages maintenance can be the most expensive phase of a project. LabVIEW projects generally involve a fair bit of maintenance, in the test environment new tests are specified, new hardware added, and operating systems get upgraded (!!). The fact that it isn't a huge problem in LabVIEW means that it is reasonably transparent, but it's a big advantage.

LabVIEW gives you the tools to write very flexible code. Issues that used to stop a project in its tracks can be quite effortless in LabVIEW. You may not have used them all or thought about writing with flexibility in mind, but they are there and waiting to be used. You will never regret putting flexibility into your software.

Finally, reusability. Every reasonably decent software engineer has a personal library of code that he or she can call upon. LabVIEW allows the programmer to simply incorporate your own code into the development environment.


   
Top


A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW
A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW
ISBN: 0130093653
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 66

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net