Spreadsheets are Code

An Overview of Software Engineering Approaches applied to Spreadsheets

Conference paper (2016)

Authors

F.F.J. Hermans Software Engineering - EEMCS
B. Jansen Software Engineering - EEMCS
S. Roy Software Engineering - EEMCS
E.A. Aivaloglou Software Engineering - EEMCS
A.A.S. Swidan Software Engineering - EEMCS
David Hoepelman Student
Research Group
Software Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Software Testing Documentation Software engineering Companies Programming profession
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Published Date

2016-3

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

Abstract

Spreadsheets can be considered to be the world's most successful end-user programming language. In fact, one could say spreadsheets are programs. This paper starts with a comparison of spreadsheets to software: spreadsheets are similar in terms of applications domains, expressive power and maintainability problems. We then reflect upon what makes spreadsheets successful: liveness, directness and an easy deployment environment seem contribute largely to their success. Being a programming language, several techniques from software engineering can be applied to spreadsheets. We present an overview of such research directions, including spreadsheet testing, reverse engineering, smell detection, clone detection and refactoring. Finally, open challenges and future plans for the domain of spreadsheet software engineering are presented.