Chapter 14: LabVIEW Software Quality Assurance Guide and Toolkit

Chapter 14: LabVIEW Software Quality Assurance Guide and Toolkit

Gary W. Johnson

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Overview

Tell me now: Would you buy a new car with full knowledge that it was built without written plans? How about a car whose entire testing and inspection phases consisted of no more than a quick road test as it rolled out of the plant? Well, that?s exactly what we do every day in the software industry. Programmers like us sit down and write programs in LabVIEW and other languages without so much as a scrap of paper listing the requirements. We do some debugging runs and patch the thing up until it (apparently) works. And we rarely bother writing a user manual. Is there something amiss here?

As a LabVIEW developer, your objective is to deliver the highest-quality product. That means analyzing (and meeting) the user?s requirements, spending some time in the design phase, and doing the coding, testing, and documentation according to some accepted standards and practices. These standards and practices are elements of software engineering , as described in Chap. 13, ?Software Engineering Primer.? They represent the path to software quality and to added value in your software. If the extra effort does not add value, you are either (A) an incredible programmer who in fact does not need any of this, or (B) only going through the motions, filling out the paperwork, and not taking any of this to heart.

I?ve struggled with this quality business...

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