Related papers: In Pursuit of Spreadsheet Excellence
The frequency with which spreadsheets are used and the associated risk is well known. Many tools and techniques have been developed which help reduce risks associate with creating and maintaining spreadsheet. However, little consideration…
Spreadsheet audit and review procedures are an essential part of almost all City of London financial transactions. Structured processes are used to discover errors in large financial spreadsheets underpinning major transactions of all…
Spreadsheets are powerful tools which play a business-critical role in many organizations. However, many bad decisions taken due to faulty spreadsheets show that these tools need serious quality assurance. Furthermore, while collaboration…
Despite strong evidence of widespread errors, spreadsheet developers rarely subject their spreadsheets to post-development testing to reduce errors. This may be because spreadsheet developers are overconfident in the accuracy of their…
Accounting and Finance (A&F) Professionals are arguably the most loyal and concentrated population of spreadsheet users. The work that they perform in spreadsheets has the most significant impact on financial data and business processes…
Most spreadsheet surveys both for reporting use and error focus on the practical application of the spreadsheet in a particular industry. Typically these studies will illustrate that a particular percentage of spreadsheets are used for…
Spreadsheet engineering adapts the lessons of software engineering to spreadsheets, providing eight principles as a framework for organizing spreadsheet programming recommendations. Spreadsheets raise issues inadequately addressed by…
We have conducted an empirical investigation into the long term survival rates of some small but representative samples of the 30,000 largest UK limited companies. These companies were either a control or known to have used, or been…
This paper presents the results of an empirical evaluation of the quality of a structured methodology for the development of spreadsheet models, proposed in numerous previous papers by Rajalingham K, Knight B and Chadwick D et al. This…
A number of automated techniques and tools were proposed in the research literature over the years which aim to support the spreadsheet developer in the process of testing and debugging a faulty spreadsheet. One underlying assumption of…
Data is a cornerstone of empirical software engineering (ESE) research and practice. Data underpin numerous process and project management activities, including the estimation of development effort and the prediction of the likely location…
Data completeness is an essential aspect of data quality, and has in turn a huge impact on the effective management of companies. For example, statistics are computed and audits are conducted in companies by implicitly placing the strong…
We introduce SpreadsheetBench, a challenging spreadsheet manipulation benchmark exclusively derived from real-world scenarios, designed to immerse current large language models (LLMs) in the actual workflow of spreadsheet users. Unlike…
Spreadsheets have been with us in their present form for over a quarter of a century. We have become so used to them that we forget that we are using them at all. It may serve us well to stand back for a moment to review where, when and how…
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…
We report on a series of experiments concerning the feasibility of example driven modelling. The main aim was to establish experimentally within an academic environment: the relationship between error and task complexity using a)…
In traditional usability studies, researchers talk to users of tools to understand their needs and challenges. Insights gained via such interviews offer context, detail, and background. Due to costs in time and money, we are beginning to…
Most organizations use large and complex spreadsheets that are embedded in their mission-critical processes and are used for decision-making purposes. Identification of the various types of errors that can be present in these spreadsheets…
The use of spreadsheets in industry is widespread. Companies base decisions on information coming from spreadsheets. Unfortunately, spreadsheets are error-prone and this increases the risk that companies base their decisions on inaccurate…
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.…