A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW

What are metrics? They are measurements of your software development. They are also quite subjective . For instance, if you counted the number of VIs in your application and used this to measure complexity, one huge VI would misguide the process. We feel that the best metric you can start out with is from a business perspective, that is, estimated hours to actual hours spent doing a project. If you are way off with this estimate, nothing else is going to help you because you will go out of business. What else can you measure? Quite a lot, as follows :

• Number of VIs (as long as you don't use one large one)

• Number of changes to a VI

• Number of defects

• Amount of maintenance

• Function points

• Amount of reuse

• Anything really, but as always, use what works and throw away what doesn't