1. System Development Getting the Job Done

2. Agenda • The Engineering Process (NI Example) • What is development? • Development methodologies • Relationship with test • Design patterns • Example(s) • Misc Comments • Conclusion

3. The Engineering Process (NI Example) • http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/7198 • Large Application Development in LabVIEW • Good practice for projects of all sizes • In reality the line between these steps is blurry

4. What is System Development? • Wikipedia on software development: “the set of activities that results in software products”, • More Wikipedia: “the software development process may involve many departments, including marketing, engineering, research and development and general management” • My version: “Turning a well thought out plan into reality, or roll up your sleeves and get er’ done”

5. Relationship to Test • While testing is implied in the NI engineering process that is not only test area • During software development continuous testing of small increments of functionality will reduce headaches later in the process • Test primarily happens during development and validation

6. Development Methodologies • Waterfall – (Wikipedia) “a sequential software development process, in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards (like a waterfall) through the phases of Conception, Initiation, Analysis, Design (validation), Construction, Testing and maintenance” • Requirements • Design • Implmentation • Verification • Maintenance • ONLY ONE PASS THROUGH THE PROCESS

7. Development Methodologies • Agile – (Wikipedia) “based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams” • Basically an iterative process that constantly takes on short objectives and makes adjustments to the design as deemed necessary with further understanding of the constraints. • ITERATIVE PROCESS WITH CONSTANT ADJUSTMENTS

8. Development Methodologies • Many Others: • Structured Design • Object Oriented • Top-Down/Bottom-Up • Stepwise Refinement • The list goes on …

9. Our Favorite Methodology • A mix of waterfall & agile • Have a well thought out plan up front which includes architecture, design, and process (Waterfall) • Execute the plan with an iterative approach that adjusts to unexpected constraints (Agile)

10. Design Patterns • Pre-designed architectures that are tested and proven to fit specific application scenario • If a good fit, design patterns provide a head-start on software development • Key is to us where appropriate. One size does not fit all.

11. NI Design Pattern Guide

12. Design Patterns • State Machines • Producer-Consumer • Event Driven • Object Oriented • Parallel Loops (multi-threaded) • See following link for good presentation: http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-4817

13. My Common UI Example (Optional) • Combination of • event driven UI • producer-consumer • state machine • Applies to requirement for user interaction with an underlying process • Remember no one design pattern fits all applications & development is NOT architecture • Optional put something together after next

14. My Favorite New Technology to LabVIEW – The Web (demo) • Remote panels don’t count for me. They are web 1.0, we now live in web 2.0. • LabVIEW 8.6 introduced a new commercial web server: EmbedThis and web services • If curious: http://www.embedthis.com • Future LabVIEW will have a real web client built on MS Silverlight and LabVIEW web services. It was demonstrated at NI Week this year. • Ready to build a web service?

15. Our Summer Intern Project • ZuhairParvez – Student at Jesuit • Energy Management – eBot • Key technologies • Single board RIO (sb-RIO) with real-time & FPGA • LabVIEW web server w/web services • Adobe Flex development environment (Flash) • USB webcam • Windows based webcam server • The internet • http://ebot.endeng.net/powerdemo/index.html

16. Misc Development Comments • Follow NI LabVIEW development guidelines, especially chapter 6 style guide. Search ni.com for “labview development guideline pdf” • Check out the Simple TCP Messaging (STM) library from NI which is great for network communication • In real-time beware of priority, blocking, and cost of code. • When doing FPGA it looks like “normal code” but remember it is actually a hardware design with very finite resource constraints

17. The End James Tillett P.E. Endeavor Engineering Inc. Ph: 503.336.1717 x101 jtillett@endeavoreng.com www.endeavoreng.com Office Hours Last Wednesday of the month 4-7 pm Food & drinks, food Come with questions, leave with answers