Authors
Jose Pedro Correia & Miguel Ferreira
Abstract
Several studies have shown how spreadsheets are pervasive in many organizations as a form of end-user programming. Despite their importance and long lifespan, they are seldom developed with maintenance concerns in mind, and organizations have no efficient way of estimating the risk they present.
In this paper we take a first step towards automated assessment of spreadsheet maintainability. We use the Goal Question Metric approach to select metrics relevant for maintainability and apply the selected metrics to a spreadsheet corpus in order to study their behavior "in the wild".
We observe that the majority of the metrics behave in the same way as similar ones for traditional software systems, which means that existing methodologies to assess maintainability can be applied to spreadsheets as well. This opens the possibility of creating instruments for organizations that rely on spreadsheets to start managing their maintainability explicitly.
Sample
This table presents some of the summary statistics for the metrics, given the selected EUSES corpus spreadsheets.
Very extreme values can be observed for almost every metric.
The majority of metrics resemble a power-law-like distribution, where most data points present low values and the distribution has a long tail. This is consistent with other software systems.
Publication
2011, 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, September, pages 516-519
