December 13, 2017 Topic

[DerrickB]

As it stands the two topics that were mentioned for use as presentations were debugging and OOP design. NI already has presentations and white papers for debugging techniques and best practices for debugging once you have a problem. These describe the tools available: highlight execution, probes, logging, etc. but good debugging practices and techniques can begin before you even start writing code. This is where OOP design can factor in: designing your application to be easily debugged is the first thing you can do to drastically improve debugging efforts once needed. At a high level I'll discuss software component organization as it applies to good software design principals and describe how it enables easier debugging. It's a safe assumption that there's already software written that needs to be debugged or you've inherited an application that needed additional development. With this in mind I'll also discuss some ways to apply debugging in the real world.

Needless to say that applications, even more-so the sourcecode, can vary drastically and the best approaches for debugging issues can vary just as much. I encourage anyone that has had difficulty with debugging a system to share the specific issues they had, whether it be specific to OOP design, data rates (big data), remote debugging for embedded devices, etc. so the demo can actually be helpful for you. You can also email me if you'd like to provide specific details that can't be shared with others and I'll create examples that still demonstrate the debugging technique but protect your IP.