Spreadsheet Engineering

Abstract

These tutorial notes present a methodology for spreadsheet engineering. First, we present data mining and database techniques to reason about spreadsheet data. These techniques are used to compute relationships between spreadsheet elements (cells/columns/rows). These relations are then used to infer a model defining the business logic of the spreadsheet. Such a model of a spreadsheet data is a visual domain specific language that we embed in a well-known spreadsheet system. The embedded model is the building block to define techniques for modeldriven spreadsheet development, where advanced techniques are used to guarantee the model-instance synchronization. In this model-driven environment, any user data update as to follow the the model-instance conformance relation, thus, guiding spreadsheet users to introduce correct data. Data refinement techniques are used to synchronize models and instances after users update/evolve the model. These notes briefly describe our model-driven spreadsheet environment, the MDSheet environment, that implements the presented methodology. To evaluate both proposed techniques and the MDSheet tool, we have conducted, in laboratory sessions, an empirical study with the summer school participants. The results of this study are presented in these notes.

Gradual structuring: Evolving the spreadsheet paradigm for expressiveness and learnability

“…Programming languages are the essential tool for software engineering. There is substantial research into spreadsheets as the most prominent end-user software engineering environment [46]- [48]. It is be beneficial to think of spreadsheets as programming languages [49], and how they can co-evolve with end-user software engineering, in a similar way [50] treats more traditional programming languages.…”