I started to write this article in June 2007 and a recent post on LAVA made me realize that it may still be of use

National Instruments (NI) has provided LabVIEW developers native OOP support (LVOOP) since LabVIEW 8.2. Users of LVOOP can quickly build single inheritance ByValue object hierarchies that are very powerful. However, there are a few corruption issues related to LVOOP that have made me realize that without SCC I would be getting nowhere on my current LVOOP project. I think these principles also apply more generically to all LabVIEW project files.

There are several hurdles that will basically ruin your day when developing in LVOOP without a good backup system in place. SCC systems provide backup and version control for all of the files that you modify during the course of development which allows you to revert your code to a known state when your files get corrupted. SCC systems basically allow you to take snapshots of your project so that you can revert your code at a very granular level should the need arise. Using SCC should be important to anyone who wants to be able to work on code which means this document applies to solo-developers and not just people working on development teams. There are no excuses for not using an SCC system!

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