Authors
Martins Francis, Dimitrios Kolovos, Nicholas Matragkas, & Richard Paige
Abstract
Spreadsheets are widely used to support software development activities. They have been used to collect requirements and software defects, to capture traceability information between requirements and test cases, and in general, to fill in gaps that are not covered satisfactorily by more specialised tools.
Despite their widespread use, spreadsheets have received little attention from researchers in the field of Model Driven Engineering.
In this paper, we argue for the usefulness of model management support for querying and modifying spreadsheets, we identify the conceptual gap between contemporary model management languages and spreadsheets, and we propose an approach for bridging it.
We present a prototype that builds atop the Epsilon and Google Drive platforms and we evaluate the proposed approach through a case study that involves validating and transforming software requirements captured using spreadsheets.
Sample
The MDE approach bridges the conceptual gap between the tabular nature of spreadsheets and the object-oriented nature of contemporary modelling technologies and model management languages. It also addresses the problem of efficiently querying spreadsheets from within such languages.
Publication
2013, Model-Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 8107, October, pages 35-51
