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The use of statistical software in academia and enterprises has been evolving over the last years. More often than not, students, professors, workers, and users, in general, have all had, at some point, exposure to statistical software.…
While scientists increasingly recognize the importance of metadata in describing their data, spreadsheets remain the preferred tool for supplying this information despite their limitations in ensuring compliance and quality. Various tools…
Context: Tables are ubiquitous formats for data. Therefore, techniques for writing correct programs over tables, and debugging incorrect ones, are vital. Our specific focus in this paper is on rich types that articulate the properties of…
Software startups are newly created companies with little operating history and oriented towards producing cutting-edge products. As their time and resources are extremely scarce, and one failed project can put them out of business,…
I revisit some classic publications on modularity, to show what problems its pioneers wanted to solve. These problems occur with spreadsheets too: to recognise them may help us avoid them.
Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…
Spreadsheet engineering methodologies are diverse and sometimes contradictory. It is difficult for spreadsheet developers to identify a spreadsheet engineering methodology that is appropriate for their class of spreadsheet, with its unique…
This paper introduces a Theory of Troubleshooting that is rooted in cognitive science. This theory helps software developers explain the challenges they face and the project risks that emerge as troubleshooting becomes difficult. We define…
Data errors are widespread in real-world databases and severely impact downstream applications, such as machine learning pipelines or business analytics reports. Causes of such errors are manifold and can arise during both the design phase…
Software engineering is not an empirically based discipline. Consequently, many of its practices are based on little more than a generally agreed feeling that something may be true. Part of the problem is that it is both relatively young…
Most organizations today use spreadsheets in some form or another to support critical business processes. However the financial resources, and developmental rigor dedicated to them are often minor in comparison to other enterprise…
This paper presents the findings of a case study of spreadsheet use in a higher education institution in the UK. The paper considers the use of spreadsheets in two units of the organisation, academic registry and finance. Spreadsheet use is…
The present paper reports the results of testing first year students of Informatics on their algorithmic skills and knowledge transfer abilities in spreadsheet environments. The selection of students plays a crucial role in the project. On…
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has finally forced corporations to examine the validity of their spreadsheets. They are beginning to understand the spreadsheet error literature, including what it tells them about the need for comprehensive…
Due to various sources of uncertainty, emergent behavior, and ongoing changes, the reliability of many socio-technical systems depends on an iterative and collaborative process in which organizations (1) analyze and learn from system…
The development of data science expertise requires tacit, process-oriented skills that are difficult to teach directly. This study addresses the resulting challenge of empirically understanding how the problem-solving processes of experts…
A huge amount of data is everyday managed in large organizations in many critical business sectors with the support of spreadsheet applications. The process of elaborating spreadsheet data is often performed in a distributed, collaborative…
Although experts diverge on how best to improve spreadsheet quality, it is generally agreed that more time needs to be spent testing spreadsheets. Ideally, experienced and trained spreadsheet engineers would carry this out, but quite often…
The use of uncontrolled financial spreadsheets can expose organizations to unacceptable business and compliance risks, including errors in the financial reporting process, spreadsheet misuse and fraud, or even significant operational…
We investigate the expressive power of spreadsheets. We consider spreadsheets which contain only formulas, and assume that they are small templates, which can be filled to a larger area of the grid to process input data of variable size.…