Seeking development environment advice

[ksholly]

Our group developed and supports 60 automated test applications primarily using VB6. We've worked with Labview and Measurement Studio. We are considering a move to Labview, VB.Net, TestStand, or a combination of these. Any thoughts?

[Dennis_Knutson]

I'm sold on TestStand. One of the nicer things about TestStand is that you use any or all of the development environments that you mentioned. Your legacy VB code can be imported and exist side-by-side with test steps written in LabVIEW, CVI, C++, or .NET. I also like it because it allows me and the other developers to concentrate on writing the actual tests and less on the user interface, report generation, and datalogging.

[gizmogal]

We recently made the move from a C-based test platform to a TestStand/LabVIEW platform which also interfaces with VB6 and VBA. We are a medical device manufacturer and have to meet very stringent validations on all our test systems (we have roughly the same number of test systems as you do).
One thing we did that I would change was to start with the full featured operator interface to create our own more limited OI. I took a look at the TS3.0 version and it looks much more manageable. But if I had it to do over again I would have started with a custom operator interface (or at least the basic one) and built up from there. In our case the operator interface is important because we need consistency for operators who move from test station to test station.
We also need very tight control of the tests we perform (can't allow sequence editing or multiple executions, for instance, or even changing sequence files or skipping steps unless the operator is trained).
It helps if you spend some time nailing down what your requirements are of your new test system. We probably didn't spend enough time on that as far as the OI was concerned.
Other than that one thing, we're very pleased with our new platform. For the first time ever we've been ready with our test systems when the program was ready to test the new product we are supposed to test. Since we usually only get a prototype a few months before we are supposed to test the assembled product, it has always been a challenge for us to come up with tests without affecting the launch schedule. TestStand and LabVIEW have enabled us to shine!