Tuesday, August 28, 2007

"We've always done it that way" - argh

That is one statement that has always bugged me. National Instruments (NI) is cutting edge, forward thinking, and a has an overall good product. Now, mix doing testing the same old way and modern technology. What does that leave you? A good overall mess, but at least it's eas to develop.

Sometimes, contractors will layout requirements for products, like User Interfaces (UI), the way they've always laid them out. And no matter what arguments you use, the want what they want.

NI makes their products very flexible. The good and bad is that it makes it easy to develop a cumbersome, less flexible UI for stubborn customers.

UI's should be independent of the UUTs to be tested or test sequences run. They should allow the tester to add new test sequences and remove old test sequences without changing the UI. NI makes developing UIs with this philosophy easy. However, UIs that are heavily integrated with the test sequences can also be easily developed. While this is good for future work and continued employment, it's not good adding or removing new tests.

But we all do what we need to do to get the job we're given done. So thanks to NI, we can easily develop inflexible projects as well as flexible projects.

Have a great day.

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