One of those questions where it would be nice to hear from other professionals working in the industry rather than the masses...
tldr; Is anyone aware of any tools for impact analysis or critical path analysis for LV?
I develop automated test platforms for UUTs. There are often several members of a related product family that can be tested on a platform. If I make a change to some code that executes on all class members, I have to validate that that change does not unduly impact my ability to test all products through it. For some of our products, this is actually a regulatory requirement for a particular approval, but for most others it's just good practice.
What happens when you have code that executes conditionally depending on the child type? The calling VI is, in theory, different - do I need to test the other cases for other products that haven't been affected, or do I need to only test the critical path that's been affected? Furthermore, how do I even check whether the critical path for a process has changed? Compare tools might tell me that the top level VI has changed, but will they indicate that most of the conditional code has not?
As with anything, any validation like this requires a modicum of common sense in its application. And there are plenty of manual things I can do to track critical paths for different children, but it'd be nice to find something a bit more powerful. I would imagine a combination of bookmarks, a rigorous standard for contents and a bit of VI Scripting could generate what I'm after, but it seems like a common problem that others would have encountered.
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CLA
