How to survive the upgrade experience

[SumRunner]

NI has posted an interesting series of articles on upgrading LabVIEW code from one version to the next, at http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/7421.

The articles result from a service we've been providing where our product support engineers (PSE's) help a customer upgrade a large LabVIEW program. The customer shares their code with the PSE's, who then follow the customer through the upgrade process. This allows NI to learn where problems in upgrades happen, and then to work to resolve the problems. Sometimes, the fix is something that the LabVIEW R&D team needs to implement. Sometimes, it is something that is best resolved with a different programming approach.

These articles describe the lessons learned - by NI and by the customer - for these large upgrades. You may gain some insight into how to architect your code for easier upgrades by reading them.

So far, there are two, but more should follow.

Also, the LabVIEW team has started to collect large (>1,000 VI's) LabVIEW applications to incorporate into our daily build process. This allows us to recompile real-world customer code as part of our daily engineering process, to see how changes affect the code. If you want to share your large LabVIEW code with NI, let me know. You would need to be willing to share your code, help us get it running, and be willing to stay in contact with our R&D team over the next few years as we have questions about your code.