Hi there everyone.
I have a sort of survey question I'd like to ask regarding reusability in LabVIEW. For those of you who have made the transition to the actor framework style of development, have you noticed an increase on reusability and a corresponding return-on-investment?
I'm curious because I've found that with previous LabVIEW architectures, reusability usually came in the form of sub-VIs, and eventually action engines. Sub-VIs and action engines represent re-usable blocks of code, but are a little bit "hard-wired". Refactoring in LabVIEW is inherently a slow process due to all the re-wiring and re-routing that's associated with a refactor job, or when building a new project in to a producer/consumer. You're always "patching in" the re-use blocks.
I'm imagining that with the Actor Framework this would end up saving you a lot of time on the re-factoring and re-use scenarios. Instead of re-using a bunch of algorithms or modules, you're re-using autonomous "sub-applications" that can operate without so many dependencies. This would enable an engineering team to be able to write a file I/O actor and rarely have to ever write a file I/O loop again--just make slight changes to the actor, or perform an override of a method in a specific project.
I'm also curious as to how adopting an architecture like this in your company might impact your business model. My theory is that it would be difficult to pursue hourly project work as the time spent on projects would decline over time, and so you'd have to begin increasing your rate to your customers--perhaps to rates that would appear absurd in order to maintain the same level of income. This kind of transition would introduce an imminent need to modify such a business model.
I'm curious if anyone is in a situation where their company has adopted these new programming practices, has seen a consequent change in the inner workings of their company, and has seen it impact (for better or worse) their relationship with their customers.
Thank you for your replies.
