Moving to LabVIEW...maybe

We're starting to investigate using LabVIEW for testing here in our group at Lockheed Martin. I'm not a LaVIEW fan but I'm always open to change if it's for good reasons. LabVIEW is for non-programmers. Since our Test Engineering group is mainly Hardware Engineers who think they can write software, but in reality, they typically don't do it well. LabVIEW targets hardware people, you connect graphical objects by "wires".



LabVIEW, like any other programming language needs style and discipline. Some of us have had LabVIEW training some haven't. Some people are dead-set against LabVIEW, some are having trouble with the paradigm shift from structured programming to a dataflow paradigm. There are many hurdles to overcome, some will accept them some won't.

One thing I'm looking into is LabVIEW style. At NI Week (which was really great) a book was available from Bloomy controls called the LabVIEW Style book. We're going to order the book to get some style for our LabVIEW. In a graphical programming, like text based programming, you need discipline to have style. If style isn't archived in text, is it easier in graphical? I don't know if it can be.

There are a lot of questions to be answered about using LabVIEW, we'll have to see how it goes.