Need a LabVIEW Expert Developer & Programmer to help with Software Decay?

What Is Software Decay?

Software decay is the slow deterioration of code, causing it to become unusable or require an upgrade.

It is present in all forms of computing, including LabVIEW programming. Some causes include:

• the structure initially given to the program becomes unsuited to the finished software. Various work-arounds are introduced to compensate for this, but this makes the program difficult to follow and inefficient
• pieces of code can become redundant (unused) as the software is modified
• coding can become messy and/or buggy, particularly if it has evolved over a period of time or if several programmers have worked on it

Bill Gates' Take on the Issue:

In 1984, Bill Gates said: “The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don’t lay a solid foundation, and then they’re not involved in the program in the future. Working with those programs gets to the point that I call ‘experimental programming’. The programmers understand so little about those programs that they can’t understand how changes might affect speed, for instance. They might use code that already exists, or they might not understand what dependencies will break if they change something. So they add new code, and then they run it and they say, ‘Oh look, it doesn’t work that way.’ That’s a very, very inefficient way to deal with a program, but a lot of projects end up exactly like that.”

Spot on, Bill!