Individuals prefer an individual WoW (way of working). Maybe especially software developers like to implement their personal perfect solution for a given problem. Some like it straight, others like it elegant and the third praise the KISS principle as the ultimate game-changer. But in the end, what we really need to find is a good way to work together.
LabVIEW is our MMORPG
Our massive multiplayer online role-playing game is called LabVIEW. As a team, we strive to achieve the game’s goal: To provide constant quality to our customers. The growing complexity in software development leads to countless possibilities to achieve our mission goal. That is why we need ways to standardize our way of working, in order to reach higher levels of efficiency and effectiveness.
At HSE we mostly work with small teams – but surely with a lot of small teams. A lone fighter can struggle the war against a hardware driver by wrapping it in an HAL. But the most brilliant code ever written becomes useless if, three months later, your colleagues have no idea about how it actually works. In the end, our way of working is about collaboration: Defining structures on organisational and technical layers which document how we work, what our work should look like, and what the output of our work shall be.
To make it easier to communicate all these pieces of information, we have our DokuWiki – the place where we define how we work: Our use of Version Control with GitFlow, Styleguides of code, Release Management with CI / CD and thousands of details more which all belong to our best practices.
The Armory
While setting up virtual machines, working with new customers and onboarding new employees, we face lots of repetitive issues. Cue our “Way of Working” repository: It provides a one-click installer that transforms a vanilla LabVIEW IDE into an HSE-enabled working environment. Its contents include:
- VI Packages
- Custom Probes
- Templates, such as Glyphs and Icons
- LabVIEW Settings (yes, really!)
- Quick Drop Plugins
- VI Analyzer Tests
The quest has just begun, and we are excited to see what other resources will be useful to include in the future. Until now, it works like a charm: We check out the latest version and apply our VI Package Configuration which will install multiple VI Packages, some of them unpublished e.g. to deploy our Icon Templates and apply our common LV.ini entries.
What about you?
How do you handle shortcuts for your Quick Drop Plugins? Are you tired of realizing that you are missing the correct VI Package in a VM and that LabVIEW again inserts these uncomfortable big icons on the BD? Leave us a reply, we’re keen to get to know our companions on this journey!
If you want to read and catch up first, make sure to visit our Dokuwiki: