It is widely documented that the absence of a structured approach to spreadsheet engineering is a key factor in the high level of spreadsheet errors. In this paper we propose and investigate the application of Test-Driven Development to the creation of spreadsheets. Test-Driven Development is an emerging development technique in software engineering that has been shown to result in better quality software code. It has also been shown that this code requires less testing and is easier to maintain. Through a pair of case studies we demonstrate that Test-Driven Development can be applied to the development of spreadsheets. We present the detail of these studies preceded by a clear explanation of the technique and its application to spreadsheet engineering. A supporting tool under development by the authors is also documented along with proposed research to determine the effectiveness of the methodology and the associated tool.
Many large financial planning models are written in a spreadsheet programming language (usually Microsoft Excel) and deployed as a spreadsheet application. Three groups, FAST Alliance, Operis Group, and BPM Analytics (under the name "Spreadsheet Standards Review Board") have independently promulgated standardized processes for efficiently building such models. These spreadsheet engineering methodologies provide detailed guidance on design, construction process, and quality control. We summarize and compare these methodologies. They share many design practices, and standardized, mechanistic pro…
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering Methods in Spreadsheets (SEMS'18), held on October 1st, 2018, in Lisbon, Portugal, and co-located with the 2018 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC).
Spreadsheets are software programs which are typically created by end-users and often used for business-critical tasks. Many studies indicate that errors in spreadsheets are very common. Thus, a number of vendors offer auditing tools which promise to detect errors by checking spreadsheets against so-called Best Practices such as "Don't put constants in fomulae". Unfortunately, it is largely unknown which Best Practices have which actual effects on which spreadsheet quality aspects in which settings. We have conducted a controlled experiment with 42 subjects to investigate the question whether …
Modern spreadsheet systems can be used to implement complex spreadsheet applications including data sheets, customized user forms and executable procedures written in a scripting language. These applications are often developed by practitioners that do not follow any software engineering practice and do not produce any design documentation. Thus, spreadsheet applications may be very difficult to be maintained or restructured. In this position paper we present in a nutshell two reverse engineering techniques and a tool that we are currently realizing for the abstraction of conceptual data model…
This paper demonstrates a methodology to help practitioners maximise the utility of complex multidisciplinary engineering models implemented as spreadsheets, an area presenting unique challenges. As motivation we investigate the expanding use of Integrated Resource Management(IRM) models which assess the sustainability of urban masterplan designs. IRM models reflect the inherent complexity of multidisciplinary sustainability analysis by integrating models from many disciplines. This complexity makes their use time-consuming and reduces their adoption. We present a methodology and toolkit for a…
Just like other software, spreadsheets can contain significant faults. Static analysis is an accepted and well-established technique in software engineering known for its capability to discover faults. In recent years, a growing number of tool vendors started offering tools that allow casual end-users to run various static analyses on spreadsheets as well. We supervised a study where three undergraduate software engineering students examined a selection of 14 spreadsheet auditing tools, trying to give a concrete recommendation for an industry partner. Reflecting on the study's results, we foun…
In this paper, we discuss the problem of the software engineering of a class of business spreadsheet models. A methodology for structured software development is proposed, which is based on structured analysis of data, represented as Jackson diagrams. It is shown that this analysis allows a straightforward modularisation, and that individual modules may be represented with indentation in the block-structured form of structured programs. The benefits of structured format are discussed, in terms of comprehensibility, ease of maintenance, and reduction in errors. The capability of the methodology…
The SSMI methodology was developed using concepts from Computer Science, Software Engineering and Information Systems and has been taught to undergraduate and MBA students and in Executive training seminars. In this paper, we describe the major characteristics of the spreadsheets developed using the methodology and show how they contribute to reduce many error causing factors.
Across an aggregation of EuSpRIG presentation papers, two maxims hold true: spreadsheets models are akin to software, yet spreadsheet developers are not software engineers. As such, the lack of traditional software engineering tools and protocols invites a higher rate of error in the end result. This paper lays ground work for spreadsheet modelling professionals to develop reproducible audit tools using freely available, open source packages built with the Python programming language, enabling stakeholders to develop clearly defined model "oracles" with which to test and audit spreadsheet calc…
This paper describes an investigation into value-based software engineering and proposes a comprehensive value taxonomy with an interpretation of design feature implications. The value taxonomy is used to assess the design of Covid19 symptom tracker applications.
Nowadays, there exist a plethora of different educational syllabi for Requirements Engineering (RE), all aiming at incorporating practically relevant educational units (EUs). Many of these syllabi are based, in one way or the other, on the syllabi provided by the International Requirements Engineering Board (IREB), a non-profit organisation devoted to standardised certification programs for RE. IREB syllabi are developed by RE experts and are, thus, based on the assumption that they address topics of practical relevance. However, little is known about to what extent practitioners actually perc…
Software Engineering as an industry is highly diverse in terms of development methods and practices. Practitioners employ a myriad of methods and tend to further tailor them by e.g. omitting some practices or rules. This diversity in development methods poses a challenge for software engineering education, creating a gap between education and industry. General theories such as the Essence Theory of Software Engineering can help bridge this gap by presenting software engineering students with higher-level frameworks upon which to build an understanding of software engineering methods and practi…
This note highlights the importance of investigating diversity aspects in combination in empirical research. It draws on the psychological discourse and suggests why and how software engineering scholars can use the aspect of diversity in all their research endeavors.
A growing number of empirical software engineering researchers suggest that a complementary focus on theory is required if the discipline is to mature. A first step in theory-building involves the establishment of suitable theoretical constructs. For researchers studying software projects, the lack of a theoretical construct for context is problematic for both experimentation and effort estimation. For experiments, insufficiently understood contextual factors confound results, and for estimation, unstated contextual factors affect estimation reliability. We have earlier proposed a framework th…
Statistics comes in two main flavors: frequentist and Bayesian. For historical and technical reasons, frequentist statistics has dominated data analysis in the past; but Bayesian statistics is making a comeback at the forefront of science. In this paper, we give a practical overview of Bayesian statistics and illustrate its main advantages over frequentist statistics for the kinds of analyses that are common in empirical software engineering, where frequentist statistics still is standard. We also apply Bayesian statistics to empirical data from previous research investigating agile vs. struct…
Using models for requirements engineering (RE) is uncommon in systems engineering, despite the widespread use of model-based engineering in general. One reason for this lack of use is that formal models do not match well the trend to move towards agile developing methods. While there exists work that investigates challenges in the adoption of requirements modeling and agile methods in systems engineering, there is a lack of work studying successful approaches of using requirements modelling in agile systems engineering. To address this gap, we conducted a case study investigating the applicati…
In general, professionals still ignore scientific evidence in place of expert opinions in most of their decision-making. For this reason, it is still common to see the adoption of new software technologies in the field without any scientific basis or well-grounded criteria, but on the opinions of experts. Experimental Software Engineering is of paramount importance to provide the foundations to understand the limits and applicability of software technologies. The need to better observe and understand the practice of Software Engineering leads us to look for alternative experimental approaches …
Software Engineering (SE) communities such as Stack Overflow have become unwelcoming, particularly through members' use of offensive language. Research has shown that offensive language drives users away from active engagement within these platforms. This work aims to explore this issue more broadly by investigating the nature of offensive language in comments posted by users in four prominent SE platforms - GitHub, Gitter, Slack and Stack Overflow (SO). It proposes an approach to detect and classify offensive language in SE communities by adopting natural language processing and deep learning…
Mitigating Omitted Variable Bias in Empirical Software Engineering
Software Institute, USI Università della Svizzera italiana（瑞士意大利大学软件研究所）；Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg（查尔姆斯理工大学和哥德堡大学）；Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS)（斯坦伦布什高级研究院）
In order to solve today's complex problems in the world of software development, technical knowledge is no longer enough. Previous studies investigating and identifying non-technical skills of software engineers show that creative skills also play an important role in tackling difficult problems. However, creativity is typically a very vague concept to which everyone gives their own interpretation. Also, there is little research that focuses specifically on creativity in the field of software engineering. To better understand the role of creativity in this field, we conducted four focus groups…
Background: A growing amount of software is available to children today. Children use both software that has been explicitly developed for them and software for general users. While they obtain clear benefits from software, such as access to creativity tools and learning resources, children are also exposed to several risks and disadvantages, such as privacy violation, inactivity, or safety risks that can even lead to death. The research and development community is addressing and investigating positive and negative impacts of software for children one by one, but no comprehensive model exists…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem（耶路撒冷希伯来大学）；Acumen Labs（Acumen实验室）
End to end learning is machine learning starting in raw data and predicting a desired concept, with all steps done automatically. In software engineering context, we see it as starting from the source code and predicting process metrics. This framework can be used for predicting defects, code quality, productivity and more. End-to-end improves over features based machine learning by not requiring domain experts and being able to extract new knowledge. We describe a dataset of 5M files from 15k projects constructed for this goal. The dataset is constructed in a way that enables not only predict…
The omnipresent nature of mobile applications (apps) in all aspects of daily lives raises the necessity of reflecting end-users values (e.g., fairness, honesty, etc.) in apps. However, there are limited considerations of end-users values in apps development. Value violations by apps have been reported in the media and are responsible for end-users dissatisfaction and negative socio-economic consequences. Value violations may bring more severe and lasting problems for marginalized and vulnerable end-users of apps, which have been explored less (if at all) in the software engineering community. …
University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；IBM Research AI（IBM人工智能研究院）
What does it mean for a generative AI model to be explainable? The emergent discipline of explainable AI (XAI) has made great strides in helping people understand discriminative models. Less attention has been paid to generative models that produce artifacts, rather than decisions, as output. Meanwhile, generative AI (GenAI) technologies are maturing and being applied to application domains such as software engineering. Using scenario-based design and question-driven XAI design approaches, we explore users' explainability needs for GenAI in three software engineering use cases: natural languag…
Context: Evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) can be an effective resource to bridge the gap between academia and industry by balancing research of practical relevance and academic rigor. To achieve this, it seems necessary to investigate EBSE training and its benefits for the practice. Objective: We sought both to develop an EBSE training course for university students and to investigate what effects it has on the attitudes and behaviors of the trainees. Method: We conducted a longitudinal case study to study our EBSE course and its effects. For this, we collect data at the end of each …
There have been recent calls for research on the human side of software engineering and its impact on various factors such as productivity, developer happiness and project success. An analysis of which challenges in software engineering teams are most frequent is still missing. We aim to provide a starting point for a theory about relevant human challenges and their causes in software engineering. We establish a reusable set of challenges and start out by investigating the effect of team virtualization. Virtual teams often use digital communication and consist of members with different nationa…
