The Benefits of Implementing CI/CD in LabVIEW Far Exceeds the Effort Required

As a Company developing automation software for Test and Measurement for the last 25+ years, we have developed several applications on LabVIEW. To this day, we believe LabVIEW remains to be the go-to language of programming for Test and Measurement applications. But with the increasing complexity of devices-under-test and the explosion of IoT, there is merit in adopting DevOps principles to improve the software development lifecycle.?

While DevOps has been traditionally associated with text-based programming languages, implementing DevOps principles in LabVIEW has been pivotal in modernizing enterprise frameworks, faster deployment cycles, and automated testing. But there’s one caveat. As a graphical programming language, establishing seamless CI/ CD workflows requires a fair bit of engineering. But investing the time and effort pays off many times over in projects that need to be maintained for many years with new feature additions on a regular basis.??

In LabVIEW, CI/ CD can be difficult due to the nature of binary files like VIs. Unlike implementing CI in text-based languages where the process of establishing a seamless workflow with the toolkits available is straightforward; CI in LabVIEW needs a fair amount of engineering - it requires specialized engineering expertise to achieve a stable workflow.?

In Soliton, we have been investing time to improve the ways we can implement CI/ CD in LabVIEW. With the use of available tools strategically and the development of our own tools, we have been able to make the workflow more flexible and feasible. The LabVIEW Code Comparison Tool for Git, available in the Soliton LabView Library (SLL) Toolkit, addresses a few problems, which you can access here.??

If you are interested in learning more about practices and tools that can help you implement CI/ CD workflows in LabVIEW, read our detailed article: CI/CD for LabVIEW – Best Practices to Implement Key Pillars of DevOps.?

Projects in LabVIEW that implement CI/ CD pipelines reap several benefits in the long term. Some big impacts that we have been able to achieve include bringing down the build-test-deploy cycle times to less than 25% of original time and catching double the number of bugs even before deployment.??

So, take the plunge! It takes a little time to warm up to, but it is worth the time and effort!?