Related papers: A Maintainability Checklist for Spreadsheets

Legacy spreadsheets are both, an asset, and an enduring problem concerning spreadsheets in business. To make spreadsheets stay alive and remain correct, comprehension of a given spreadsheet is highly important. Visualization techniques…

Spreadsheet users regularly deal with uncertainty in their data, for example due to errors and estimates. While an insight into data uncertainty can help in making better informed decisions, prior research suggests that people often use…

There has been a significant amount of research into spreadsheets over the last two decades. Errors in spreadsheets are well documented. Once used mainly for simple functions such as logging, tracking and totalling information, spreadsheets…

This paper presents the authors recommended practices for spreadsheet testing. Documented spreadsheet error rates are unacceptable in corporations today. Although improvements are needed throughout the systems development life cycle,…

This paper presents the arguments and supporting business metrics for Enterprise Spreadsheet Management to be seen as a necessary good. These arguments are divided into a summary of external business drivers that make it necessary and the…

The first fully-documented study into the quantitative impact of errors in operational spreadsheets identified an interesting anomaly. One of the five participating organisations involved in the study contributed a set of five spreadsheets…

Testing is a vital part of software development, and spreadsheets are like any other software in this respect. This paper discusses the testing of spreadsheets in the light of one practitioner's experience. It considers the concept of…

Few major commercial or economic decisions are made today which are not underpinned by analysis using spreadsheets. It is virtually impossible to avoid making mistakes during their drafting and some of these errors remain, unseen and…

Just like other software, spreadsheets can contain significant faults. Static analysis is an accepted and well-established technique in software engineering known for its capability to discover faults. In recent years, a growing number of…

Spreadsheets are used extensively in industry, often for business critical purposes. In previous work we have analyzed the information needs of spreadsheet professionals and addressed their need for support with the transition of a…

We developed an internet-based questionnaire on spreadsheet use that we administered to a large number of users in several companies and organizations to document how spreadsheets are currently being developed and used in business. In this…

The paper examines in the context of financial reporting, the controls that organisations have in place to manage spreadsheet risk and errors. There has been widespread research conducted in this area, both in Ireland and internationally.…

Fifteen years of research studies have concluded unanimously that spreadsheet errors are both common and non-trivial. Now we must seek ways to reduce spreadsheet errors. Several approaches have been suggested, some of which are promising…

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…

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…

Spreadsheets are widely used, and studies have shown that most end-user spreadsheets contain nontrivial errors. To improve end-users productivity, recent research proposes the use of a model-driven engineering approach to spreadsheets. In…

The usual aim of spreadsheet audit is to verify correctness. There are two problems with this: first, it is often difficult to tell whether the spreadsheets in question are correct, and second, even if they are, they may still give the…

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…

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…

Developing an error-free spreadsheet has been a problem since the beginning of end-user computing. In this paper, we present a methodology that separates the modeling from the implementation. Using proven techniques from Information Systems…