Experience Report: Visual Programming in the Real World*

This paper reports direct experience with two commercial, widely used visual programming environments. While neither of these systems is object oriented, the tools have transformed the development process and indicate a direction for visual object oriented tools to proceed. This paper reports on real world applications of visual tools that have exposed a perhaps unexpected effect of the systems development environment: The most dramatic gains in productivity are attributed to the communication among the customer, developer and computer that are facilitated by the visual syntax of the tools. If a similar level of communications support can be achieved in the visual object oriented programming environment, even greater productivity gains then now available can be expected. In our environment of test and measurement, visual programming currently provides productivity improvements of from four to ten times compared to conventional text-based programming. Two specific projects are discussed. The first is an application created as the result of parallel development between a visual programming team and a text-based (’C’) programming team. The second application involved ground test and characterization of two aspects of a large space-based instrument. These examples were selected from over forty projects completed using these tools