The 24th meeting of the Würzburg LabVIEW User Group (WUELUG) once again brought together the local LabVIEW community for an evening of technical exchange, discussion, and networking. Around 30 participants gathered in the familiar surroundings of the box at HSE’s headquarters at Bürgerbräu, continuing the tradition of combining practical software engineering topics with the relaxed atmosphere that defines WUELUG events.
As always, attendees were reminded that participation in user group meetings can count toward NI recertification, making the evening valuable not only for knowledge sharing but also for maintaining professional credentials.
And as usual by now, NI attended our event, namely in the person of Jan Göbel. Thanks for joining us!
Continuous Integration for LabVIEW
The main presentation focused on Continuous Integration (CI) and how modern development practices can be applied in LabVIEW environments.
Interest in the topic was clearly high. While many attendees were curious about CI workflows and tooling, only a few teams reported already running full CI pipelines in their projects. The discussion therefore covered both conceptual foundations and practical entry points.
One of the key principles highlighted was a simple but important rule:
do not build where you develop
Separating development environments from automated build environments avoids configuration drift and ensures that builds remain reproducible and reliable.
Static Analysis and Automation
Many participants were already familiar with the VI Analyzer toolkit and its role in automated code quality checks. The session explored how VI Analyzer can be integrated into CI pipelines, especially when combined with scripting and automation techniques.
Additional tools and approaches discussed included:
- Git hooks to trigger checks automatically during development
- Static code analysis to enforce coding guidelines
- The Caraya testing framework for automated tests
- The Antidoc API for automatically generating project documentation
These tools illustrate how the LabVIEW ecosystem increasingly supports the same engineering practices long established in other software environments.
Version Control and Branching Strategies
Version control also sparked lively discussion.
Nearly everyone present was familiar with Git, although not every team had adopted it in daily practice yet. This led to an exchange of experiences around repository management and collaboration workflows.
Branching strategies in particular generated debate:
- trunk-based development vs. Gitflow
- Git compared to legacy SVN workflows
- how branching models affect build automation and release processes
Closely related was the topic of separating compiled code from source code in LabVIEW projects, a prerequisite for clean diffs and effective collaboration.
Several upcoming improvements on the LabVIEW roadmap were also mentioned, including:
- improved Git diff capabilities
- HTML-based diffing
- container-based build environments
These developments may make CI/CD pipelines significantly easier to implement for LabVIEW projects in the future.
Another practical question raised during the discussion was licensing: how floating licenses behave in CI/CD environments and what strategies teams can use when build servers require toolchain access.
Pizza Break
After the technical deep dive, it was time for the traditional pizza break. Delicious pizzas from Locanda were served and quickly disappeared. Thank you to NI for sponsoring food and beverages!!
One lesson learned for the next meeting: bring knives.
What’s Next for WUELUG?
As always, WUELUG thrives on contributions from the community. Future topics and potential hosts are already being discussed. Ideas that surfaced during the evening included:
- hosting a meeting at Siemens
- sessions about hobby projects
- exploring AI-related tooling
- discussions around the Model Control Protocol
- possibly even expanding to a full WUELUG day event
If you are interested in hosting a future session or presenting a topic, the organizers would love to hear from you.
Release Automation Tools for LabVIEW
If you’re interested in fast-tracking your team’s progress with CI/CD, take a look at our ready-made product for server-side automation of development tasks: