How to produce better quality test software

LabWindows/CVI is a popular C compiler for writing automated test equipment (ATE) test software. Since C was designed as a portable assembly language, it uses many low-level machine operations that tend to be error prone, even for the professional programmer. Test equipment engineers also tend to underestimate the effort required to write high-quality software. Quality software has very few defects and is easy to write and maintain. The examples used in this article are for the C programming language, but the principles also apply to most other programming languages. Most of the tools mentioned work with both C and C++ software.