Software is indispensable in the test-and-measurement process, and companies offer a variety of powerful solutions to get you from design through characterization and validation and on to production test. These tools include, for example, NI LabVIEW and Keysight’s portfolio of EEsof tools.

But such software can be expensive and hard for the novice to master. Speaking earlier this month at NIWeek, Jeff Kodosky, NI cofounder and “the father of LabVIEW,” acknowledged that LabVIEW has a learning curve. As for the effort to climb that curve—“It’s worth it,” he emphasized, but not everyone can immediately get up to speed as a certified LabVIEW programmer.

In fact, not every electrical engineer—or domain expert in another field—wants to be a programmer at all. Consequently, many people want to buy an instrument-and-software combination that they can use out of the box with minimal or no training.

Keysight and NI clearly recognize this. Keysight, for example, offers BenchVue, which supports multiple-instrument measurement and data-capture applications, without the need for instrument programming. And NI offers VirtualBench, a software-centric multi-instrument platform with a mobile-device-like UI.

Other companies offer such software tools as well. Our November print issue will include a staff-written article on such tools, including software that provides a good out-of-the-box experience for purchasers of benchtop, portable, and USB instruments as well as simple PXI systems that might be used in a bench environment.

We welcome your input for this article. If you are a test instrument customer, tell us what features you like or don’t like about the software that comes with instruments you’ve purchased recently. And even if you are an expert programmer, are there times when you want to make a simple measurement without any coding?

If you are a test-and-measurement company, what software do you offer that provides your customers with a good “out of the box” experience—allowing them to get up and running without coding? What’s unique about your approach? What functions does your software enable (for example, instrument setup and control, data capture and analysis, report generation, collaboration)?

Please add a comment below or send your input to [email protected].