Random Ramblings on LabVIEW Design

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swatts
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Tomorrow the CLA Summit in Austin starts and I really wish I was there. Ah well I'll have fun in Roma.

So just to bring everyone up to speed.....

CLA = Certified LabVIEW Architect <--- highest LabVIEW certification.

Every year there are 2 CLA summits, one in Austin and one in Europe. A subject is picked (which I usually studiously ignore for my presentation), and 2 days of presentations and a day of round table discussions follow.

It's full on! and I have to admit I begin to flag after day 2 and while I'm in confession I'll also admit that sometimes the discussions go right over my head, but that's actually a really good thing. I want to be challenged by the discussions, it's brilliant. For me the main education I now get is from the community.

The software process is coming to the fore and currently there's a focus on Agile, LabVIEW fits very nicely with the Agile Manifesto. In fact Kent Beck would explode with joy if he saw the inclusive way most LabVIEW projects are developed. The only thing I would like, is for us to push our own manifesto, I strongly believe that LabVIEW is sufficiently different and rapid that it bends standard processes somewhat.

The focus in Europe seems to be more at looking into architectural issues and pulling them apart. Also 6 of the presenters come from our user group CSLUG, it's something of which I'm pretty proud.

I'll also doff my cap to the new CLD summits, I attended the latter part of the inaugural summit in Newbury and it was excellent.

Austin in March smells nice to my European nose, is it the Cedar?

I'm enjoying preparing my presentation this year, it's something a bit different again, hopefully it will sit in the back of peoples mind and niggle away at them. It's been a long time in gestation and explores some thoughts I've been mulling for years now. The start of formalising the concepts started here and in the LabVIEW Rocks section of our book. I really want to get a handle on why I found LabVIEW to be different to the other languages I've used.

So if you need an excuse to get certified, it's hard to get and easy to keep and you get to meet up with clever people in nice places, as a bonus you get your brain filled up with ideas.

So for everyone who is attending travel carefully and enjoy!

Lots of Love

Steve

swatts
9282 Views
5 Comments

As you may have noticed I studiously avoid writing marketing pieces carefully disguised as news..........

But NOT today!

It's only because I'm chuffed though as we got our ISO9001:2008 certificate on Friday and it's been a pretty positive process.

ISO9K Logo.jpg

First of all it's a fair investment of time and money for a company of 3 (about $4k a year for consultancy and surveillance) and that doesn't include our time in designing and maintaining the processes. Like all business decisions the question needs to be ..can we get the money back?. Rather luckily for us one of my customers pays this as part of their support agreement..bonus!

Why do they do this you may ask, is it because we're so amazing. Nope, it just makes their paperwork easier. If we have a certificate they don't need to audit us, they in turn don't need to be audited and so the gravy train rolls on.

So for the small businesses out there here's what we did....

We hired a consultant (Daniel Russell) that supplied an online Quality Management System (QMS), this was modified to our company needs.

The QMS describes the scope of the system (design, provision and supply of software with associated support) and then describes the processes and documents used for handling complaints, training, roles and responsibilities etc. Covering Design, Nonconforming product, purchasing, inspection and monitoring. It has an online audit, management meeting, training and feedback system.

I found this to be the difficult bit to get my head around, luckily our consultant made it nice and easy.

We automated what we could (see Emails, Bug Reporting, Backups, VPS) and were in the lucky position where we all work in approximately the same fashion (consider that between the 3 of us we have about 90 years experience, so it could have been a bit like ductaping 6 angry giraffes into a cardboard box). For us automation is great, it's what we do and saves us writing documentation. So for example the method for backing up is to select backup from a menu on our project management tool.

Let's look back at the working in the same fashion comment, this I think is what has made it relatively straight forward and is a bit of an advantage for us. We have a common design methodology that allows us to all develop code in a similar way and to a similar rhythm. So although our methodology may cause some contention out there in the community, the fact we all comply to it is HUGELY valuable (Oh and we broke though 200+ projects now, so it's pretty tried and tested).

Bug reporting and version control are other fantastic tools that most of us routinely employ and that the world of quality just loves!. Showing how we can download the latest versions of our documents, just by right-clicking and selecting update was a real boon.

So the assessment was conducted last Friday by our assessor Stan and we sailed through with nothing more than a "Well Done!". He was extremely helpful and made some very good points. It took 6 hours and made my brain hurt!. We will then be checked yearly and the jobs a good-un!

The benefits are pretty easy, we are adding value to our service so we can charge more, but on top of that are that good practices make good software. The effort we put in means that the system works for us, rather than us bending to it. In the UK military, Govt, large blue chips all would like their suppliers to have it, because it saves them money and time in assessing us.

Lots of love

Quality Steve