Spreadsheet Engineering

This project commenced in September 2008 and will examine the use of refactoring methods during development to improve the structure of spreadsheets thereby making them more reliable and easier to understand, test and extend.

Through the INTEREST project funded by Enterprise Ireland Proof of Concept programme in 2008, the team researched the management of spreadsheet relationships through advanced visualization and interaction control. Prototype technologies were researched and developed. In addition quality assessment to support review and audit using innovative Bayesian Belief Technology has been researched and demonstrated. Significant product and market awareness work as well as industry analysis was also conducted. A patent application is in preparation, and the group are currently exploring, through the Business Partners Programme, the spinout of a campus company.

SPRING is an applied research project with a strong commercial focus. Our aim is to develop, over a 12 month period, a demonstration of an intelligent automated remodelling tool for the spreadsheet paradigm. This project is funded by Enterprise Ireland to the value of 80k euro and began in September 2009. It is led by Mr Ronan MacRuairi and Dr Kevin McDaid. Further information can be obtained from Ronan at ronan.macruairi@dkit.ie

The SPECIFIC project aims to research and develop innovative risk assessment and verification technologies to enhance and add value to enterprise level spreadsheet management solutions for the financial industry. The technologies will significantly enhance the capability of auditors, financial managers and developers to manage spreadsheet risk levels and determine spreadsheet correctness in compliance with extant financial regulations.

The project commenced in June 2009 and is very much commercial in nature. It is funded by Enterprise Ireland to the amount of 380k euro over two years. It is led by Dr Kevin McDaid and further details can be obtained from Kevin at kevin.mcdaid@dkit.ie

This project proposes the application of the software development methodology, Test-Driven Development, to spreadsheet engineering. Test-Driven Development is a proven technique for the development, rather than testing, of software that originated as a best-practice in Extreme Programming. Extreme Programming is one of a number of software development processes, known as Agile Methods that advocate a more flexible customer focused approach to the creation of software.

We have developed a tool to track user activity during the debugging of a trial spreadsheet which has been seeded with errors. Time based analysis can then be carried out on the resulting data, allowing many patterns of error discovery to be derived based on differing variables. The experiment is ongoing, with participants from a professional background (accounting, finance etc.) and the student population partaking.

For many users voice interaction, rather than traditional mouse and keyboard, is the preferred mode of control for ICT technology. While voice-control technology is well advanced for word processing applications there is little research available on the effectiveness of such technology for spreadsheets. This project investgiates the use of voice to control navigation of spredsheets during auditing.

Spreadsheets continue to be used even though spreadsheet developers use little or no standard development practices from the software industry. This has given rise to a high level of error in spreadsheets. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has forced companies to examine the role spreadsheets play in their financial reporting and decision-making processes. This can require an increase in company resources to adhere to such regulations.