Authors
Christophe Peixoto
Abstract
There is a huge number of spreadsheets developed by end-user programmers, and this number is continually increasing. Since those end-user programmers often have little or no training at programming at all, there is a huge number of spreadsheets, around 90%, which contains errors and have a poor quality.
Lacking of an international standard for the evaluation of spreadsheet quality, developers doesn't know what objectives to aim to achieve a quality spreadsheet, and users doesn't know if the spreadsheet they are using have quality. For this reason, based on the ISO\IEC9126, we worked on and define our own quality model for spreadsheets.
Using the metrics developed by both SSaaPP partners, SIG and Hugo Ribeiro, we analyzed the widely-used EUSES spreadsheet corpus, obtaining the normal values expected on a spreadsheet. With those values, we were able to quantify each sharacteristic and sub-characteristics of our quality model, and to define a rating for the different range of values.
And with the growing number of both mobile and web applications, and also of web-based offce suite like Google Docs, where documents can be acceded anywhere with an internet connection, opening new perspectives, we choose to create one Android application an Android SDK, and a web application with Google Web Toolkit (GWT), in which any person with a Google Docs account could test the quality of his spreadsheet based on our quality model for spreadsheet.
Sample
The quality model evaluates each spreadsheet using a 5-star rating scale for characteristics of: functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, and maintainability.
Publication
2011, Master's thesis, Universidade do Minho, October
Full article
Quality model for spreadsheets
