Overview of use in project

[wildcatherder]

I've read through the getting started article and read the article on Hardware Mocking but what I see is just an arbitrarily modified VI being embedded in another VI which does simple comparison testing. Is that what VI Tester does? Could I see a more "real world" example of how and, perhaps more to the point, why I would do this? As a rule, I test a VI when I construct it. This seems overly formalized for most cases. Why would I want to retest a working VI later?

[Jim Kring]

I've read through the getting started article and read the article on Hardware Mocking but what I see is just an arbitrarily modified VI being embedded in another VI which does simple comparison testing. Is that what VI Tester does? Could I see a more "real world" example of how and, perhaps more to the point, why I would do this? As a rule, I test a VI when I construct it. This seems overly formalized for most cases. Why would I want to retest a working VI later?

 

JKI engineer Jack Dunaway wrote a great blog article called "Don't Throw Away Your "Throw-Away" Code" that talks about how to leverage the test code you write as your construct your VIs. Check it out and see if it answers any of your questions. To answer your last question, "Why would I want to retest a working VI later?", because often times VIs don't always work later, as improvements are made to the code or various other conditions change (like upgrading the source code to a newer version of LabVIEW). Having unit tests that you run frequently (especially before building your exe) lets you know about these "bugs" in your code before you ship it to your customer.

 

-Jim