Migrating from Python to Labview... Wise?

[ceaser333]

I lead a small team of developers and testers for a medium size company focused on hardware for automotive.

Throughout the last few years, most of our testing and automation is done with Python and Robot Framework, the developers have created drivers to interact with the laboratory equipment and create keywords for the testers, who then develop the tests in Robot. It works relatively well.

Last year we were acquired by a big multinational and now we have much more budget, along with lots of pressure due to many more projects, new technologies, new needs and expectations. Because of our location, is not a company that attracts talent and the company does not consider remote work. Most of our staff were interns ten years ago from the local area who have only been in this company throughout their carreers.

We have relative freedom from the parent company in regards to our processes as long as we deliver, and because of the difficulties obtaining new manpower and the need to cover so much in so little time we are considering moving our testing and automation to LabView and TestStand, we believe that testers will also become more self sufficient with these tools and not depend as much on the developers.

However, I see some drawbacks, we do not have much experience with Labview, we would need to deprecate most if not all of our previous Python infrastructure, I think that Labview might not be as flexible as Python due to its graphic nature, some of the staff feel like they will be pigeonholed into labview and ultimately I feel we are locking ourselves to NI.

I was looking for different oppinions on people that might have experienced this before and what made you decide one or the other, as well as a starting point on how to get certified in Labview. I also think it might be interesting for other people to see what comes out of this.

Thank you for your time.

[altenbach]

Interestingly, you posted this in the Teststand forum instead of the LabVIEW forum. I have no experience with Teststand, but LabVIEW is certainly a powerful and fast tool. Coming from 25+ years of text programming, I switched to LabVIEW 25+ years ago and would never go back to text based code. Graphical programming requires some adjustments in thinking, so talking about training and certification is important.

The newest LabVIEW versions has a tight python integration that would probably ease the transition and allow retaining parts of your current code base. You can have both!

[santo_13]

It is not a straightforward answer, we have seen the aversion with almost every text-based programmer when LabVIEW is introduced (of course there is a learning curve) but always have an open mind to fully understand as it will help you make the right choice for your requirement (not every problem be solved with a hammer). Given your team is completely new to LabVIEW and TestStand, you're in no state to build even a moderate-sized framework or solution.

LabVIEW and TestStand support calling Python modules, this way you can still reuse some of your IP but along the way you might uncover certain limitations and put more thought into rearchitecting your framework and user workflow for the best.

The summary is that you need a LabVIEW+TestStand consultant to analyze your current framework, and type of work and help you make the right choice and plan a roadmap of how to proceed for long-term sustainability.