We are giving our customers a cutting-edge development environment
With HDevelop, MVTec offers its customers a development environment that is unique in the world of machine vision. The company is currently redeveloping this environment and also working on its HALCON engine. In the interview, Johannes Dieterich, Director Product Development, and Hannes Cmarits, Product Owner HALCON IDE, explain why the new development, known as HDevelopEVO, was necessary and what customers can look forward to.
As part of its HALCON machine vision software, MVTec provides the integrated development environment HDevelop, which is currently being revamped. First of all, how does a development environment benefit the customer?
Johannes Dieterich: Integrated development environments, or IDE for short, play a key role in the automation industry. They allow developers to create and program entire software applications themselves. The unique selling point of our HDevelop environment is that it is tailored specifically to the needs of machine vision software developers. Our IDE plays a key role in accessing the MVTec machine vision library, which contains more than 2,100 operators. That allows it to perform nearly all machine vision tasks.
Hannes Cmarits: We deliver crucial added value for the machine vision industry with our HALCON software. The development environment and the HALCON Engine – the latest version of which is known as HALCON Script Engine – enable developers of machine vision solutions to use HALCON.
Like the previous HDevelop, HDevelopEVO offers a number of advantages over other IDEs: easy visualization of image data, including images, regions, and edges. It also features a powerful autocompletion function that supports the insertion and parameterization of HALCON operators, as well as debugging with an edit & continue functionality unmatched by any other product on the market.
You are now revamping the development environment. What new features can customers look forward to?
Johannes: We can say with confidence that our MVTec HALCON machine vision software is one of the best-known and most powerful products on the market. We are committed to maintaining this level of performance in the future. The newly developed version will provide our customers with a modern development environment that incorporates cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence, and integrates more easily into development processes. At the same time, it was important to us to make it as easy as possible for our customers to work with our development environment.
Hannes: HDevelopEVO preserves the tried and tested while also taking a giant step forward. A development environment includes, in addition to the previously mentioned visualization, other elements such as an editor, a debugger, a version control system, and an interpreter. In our case, this is HALCON Engine, which will be renamed the “HALCON Script Engine” in the future. This is where our innovations begin: We use the Theia framework for the HDevelopEVO editor, which resembles the popular VS Code. This introduces a range of new functionalities. Multi-line editing and a wide scrollbar make editing easier. Development is simplified through to the introduction of code snippets. Another new feature of HDevelopEVO will be support for version control systems. The integration of Git allows changes made to a script to be tracked, older versions of the code to be accessed, and the project’s progress to be documented. All actions can be carried out right in the IDE, eliminating the need to switch tools. Additionally, to further simplify process integration, a browser-based version will also be available.
Describing all innovations in detail would go beyond the scope of this interview: There are far too many of them. However, I’d like to briefly mention them: There will be a new documentation system, and we are working to improve prototyping with AI support. We want to provide a chatbot and offer AI assistance in other areas as well. HDevelopEVO is designed to fully support users in solving machine vision tasks throughout the entire user journey, where user-friendliness is a critical quality feature.
Can you elaborate on the idea of user-friendliness, i.e., usability?
Hannes: Usability is a critical factor for software products, especially for integrated development environments. Good usability ensures that developers work more efficiently, make fewer mistakes, and have a better user experience overall. Our approach with HDevelopEVO is to rely on proven concepts and to adapt them when we see added value or necessity. Through design sprints, feedback, customer requests, and dedicated conversations on the user journey and HDevelopEVO with customers, we have gained a clear understanding of what needed to be created. To give an example: Our users already work with different IDEs to accomplish their machine vision tasks. They were not always able to do this with HDevelop, and we wanted to change that. Since we also wanted to make it easier to get started with our IDE, it made sense of utilizing known designs and concepts to improve usability. For this, we rely on our UX designers, who incorporate proven concepts and adapt them when necessary.
What kind of feedback did customers give you on HDevelopEVO?
Hannes: We took a proactive approach to the redevelopment and notified customers early on, drawing on their input and feedback, for example during the first design sprints.
It was important, particularly in the beginning, to gather the users’ wishes and suggestions. In subsequent conversations with our customers, we sought to identify any gaps, for example in the customer journey.
We asked the following question: Did we cover all aspects of how our customers currently work with the existing development environment? During the next phase, we presented the prototype and gathered feedback. Along with suggestions for changes, we also received a lot of positive responses. Here is an amusing anecdote: In our conversations, we occasionally asked customers how they thought the new IDE should look without them having seen anything beforehand. They often replied, “We’d like it to have the same design as VS Code.” The customers were always very pleased when we presented the designs for HDevelopEVO.
Who took part in the development process?
Johannes: Redeveloping HDevelopEVO was certainly one of MVTec’s biggest development projects in recent years. Particularly because there are a great many details to consider, and HDevelop provides an extensive range of functionalities. What I am particularly proud of is the dedication our employees. Virtually all of the company’s departments were involved. Along with traditional software developers, UX designers contributed to ensure a high level of usability. Our agile structures were and are, of course, helpful in this endeavor. Scrum Masters and Product Owners are only two of the roles that have contributed to the project’s great success so far. Moreover, our product managers support the effort by providing input, and acting as a bridge to our customers. Colleagues from our Customer Services department helped out with testing, and the Market Communication department handled external communications.
The project is thus also a wonderful opportunity for our colleagues to test new methods and try out something entirely different. This is important to us as a company because at MVTec, we place great emphasis on continuous development and providing our employees with a dynamic and varied work environment.