Idea Exchange: LabVIEW Roadmap

[User002]

One improvement that I can see helping both idea suggesters and moderators: Help us know the scope of potential LabVIEW change.

Many ideas here are marked complete because they've been implemented in NXG. (Samples 1, 2, 3)

The message I get from this status is, "That's a great idea. We'll put resources toward making our next-generation product do that awesome thing, but it's more work that we want to do on the current generation product."

Many others are marked declined because significant changes to LabVIEW aren't planned (presumably in consideration of end-of-life). (Samples 1, 2, 3)

The message I get from this status is, "That's a great idea, but it would cost us more than we want to put into our current-generation product."

I think both of those messages are totally valid, but I find myself increasingly reserved about suggesting ideas here because I don't know where those thresholds lie. Could the community receive some guidelines on what type of change might make it into LabVIEW? If we had those guidelines, we could save our own time by only suggesting things that might make it in and we could save the moderator's time by reducing the number of ideas to have to process.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

> Could the community receive some guidelines on what type of

> change might make it into LabVIEW?

Not really. What we can afford to do in LabVIEW 20xx changes with which developers we have available that can be spared at that moment from LV NXG, so major efforts tend to go into their areas of expertise. That can shift radically from year to year. We have a couple long-term projects running in LabVIEW 20xx, but most of the feature set for the next release is only planned as the current release is going out the door. LV NXG maintains a more agile, quarterly release tempo.

I can say that because the desktop and real-time compilers and run-time engines are shared between 20xx and NXG, requests that only affect those back ends are more likely to get traction than most, just because they benefit both platforms. But most requests are editor and language level requests, so that doesn't help much. Generally the only request for the compiler and run-time engine is a standing request of "make it run faster with less memory". 🙂

[EricR]

I understand the idea/request.  The reason I'm declining it is because I would actually prefer to hear all the ideas, even the ones NI ends up declining.  NI declining an idea isn't suggesting its not a good idea. Its just that either it isn't something NI will do, or its something NI will do with another product than where its been suggested.  I've seen ideas that I've declined in the Idea Exchange get implemented by one of NI's partners or by someone in the community and I think that is wonderful.

I should also point out that when NI declines something because significant changes to a product aren't planned, sometimes it is specific to the areas of code that would need to change in order to implement the idea, not to the product in general.  In LabVIEW's specific case, LabVIEW will not be end-of-life anytime in the foreseeable future, but it is true that for some specific ideas, there are no plans to make those types of changes.

Hopefully you will still submit your ideas in the idea exchange.  We all benefit from hearing the feedback.