Spreadsheets Reverse Engineering
Spreadsheet applications are widely adopted by millions of end users from several application domains and provide strategic support to many business, scientific, industrial, and organizational processes. These applications are usually developed by rapid application development processes, exploiting host scripting languages allowing the basic spreadsheets to provide complex functionality, business rules, and user interfaces. Several factors complicate the comprehension of these applications because they are usually developed and maintained by end users without specific software engineering skills, grow over time, are not adequately documented, and do not present explicit separation between data, business logic, and user interface layers. This paper presents a reverse engineering tool intended to support the comprehension of Excel spreadsheet applications developed using the Visual Basic for Application programming language. The tool has been implemented as an add‐in that extends the Excel working environment by providing analysis and visualization features. It is able to extract information about the elements composing the analyzed Excel spreadsheet application, the functionality it exposes through its user interface, and the dependencies among its cells. This information is provided by means of interactive views. The validity of the tool has been assessed by a qualitative case study performed with professional end users from an automotive industrial domain.
EXACT: A tool for comprehending VBA-based Excel spreadsheet applications
Toward Reverse Engineering of VBA Based Excel Spreadsheet Applications
A Reverse Engineering Process for Inferring Data Models from Spreadsheet-based Information Systems: An Automotive Industrial Experience
Domenico Amalfitano, Anna Rita Fasolino, Porfirio Tramontana, Vincenzo De Simone, Giancarlo Di Mare, Stefano Scala:
A Reverse Engineering Process for Inferring Data Models from Spreadsheet-based Information Systems: An Automotive Industrial Experience. DATA (Revised Selected Papers) 2014: 136-153
Migrating legacy spreadsheets-based systems to Web MVC architecture: An industrial case study.
Domenico Amalfitano, Anna Rita Fasolino, Valerio Maggio, Porfirio Tramontana, Giancarlo Di Mare, Ferdinando Ferrara, Stefano Scala:
Migrating legacy spreadsheets-based systems to Web MVC architecture: An industrial case study. CSMR-WCRE 2014: 387-390
Information Extraction from Legacy Spreadsheet-based Information System - An Experience in the Automotive Context.
Domenico Amalfitano, Anna Rita Fasolino, Porfirio Tramontana, Vincenzo De Simone, Giancarlo Di Mare, Stefano Scala:
Information Extraction from Legacy Spreadsheet-based Information System - An Experience in the Automotive Context. DATA 2014: 389-398
Reverse Engineering of Data Models from Legacy Spreadsheets-Based Systems: An Industrial Case Study
Domenico Amalfitano, Anna Rita Fasolino, Valerio Maggio, Porfirio Tramontana, Vincenzo De Simone:
Reverse Engineering of Data Models from Legacy Spreadsheets-Based Systems: An Industrial Case Study. SEBD 2014: 123-130