Spreadsheet Engineering: A Research Framework

TL;DR

This paper proposes a research framework for spreadsheet engineering, adapting software engineering principles to improve spreadsheet development, addressing unique challenges, user heterogeneity, and deployment of best practices.

Contribution

It introduces a structured research framework with principles tailored for spreadsheet engineering, highlighting unique issues and guiding best practice deployment.

Findings

Spreadsheets enable rapid modeling and exploratory analysis.

Users learn slowly due to focus on problem domain rather than programming.

Heterogeneity of users necessitates a taxonomy for recommendations.

Abstract

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 software engineering. Spreadsheets are a powerful modeling language, allowing strategic rapid model change, and enabling exploratory modeling. Spreadsheets users learn slowly with experience because they focus on the problem domain not programming. The heterogeneity of spreadsheet users requires a taxonomy to guide recommendations. Deployment of best practices is difficult and merits research.