According to Professor Tom Grossman, author of the popular EuSpRIG paper “Spreadsheet Engineering: a Research Framework”, spreadsheet best practices are “Situation Dependent”, a view that is supported widely within the practitioner community. Guidance on spreadsheet best practice is therefore gradually emerging, as it depends upon what you are doing. Here are some documents to get you started on the subject of best practice.
Spreadsheet Auditing for Free (1.56Mb pdf) by Ray Butler presentation to ISACA Northern UK Jan 2006.
How do you know your spreadsheet is right? (666K pdf) More than fifty Principles, Techniques and Practice of Spreadsheet Style by Philip L. Bewig July 28, 2005. With references.
Spreadsheet Modelling Best Practice (1.4MB pdf) kindly donated by Louise Bartlett of IBM Business Consulting Services. Written by Nick Read and Jonathan Batson when Business Dynamics were part of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), published 1999 by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW).
In a "Software Management" article (Jan 2001) "Software Defect Reduction Top 10 List" (121K PDF) Barry Boehm and Victor Basili predict "The ranks of 'sorcerers apprentice' user-programmers will also swell rapidly, giving many who have little training or expertise in how to avoid or detect high-risk defects tremendous power to create high-risk defects."
Professor Ray Panko, University of Hawaii, gave some comprehensive guidance on testing spreadsheets at the EuSpRIG 2006 conference. Ray’s paper "Recommended Practices for Spreadsheet Testing" is available here.
Dr Louise Pryor gave a succinct outline of the principles of testing spreadsheets in her paper “When, Why and How to test spreadsheets”. In her follow up paper, she describes why merely establishing correctness of a spreadsheet may not be enough. Grenville Croll describes how a large accounting firm reviews spreadsheet models for accuracy. Harmen Ettema and colleagues from Price Waterhouse Coopers describes another approach – building a shadow model – to determine accuracy in important spreadsheet calculations. Simon Murphy describes his commercially based spreadsheet review process.
Dr John Raffensperger of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, gave a memorable presentation at the EuSpRIG 2001 conference in Amsterdam on “New Guidelines for Spreadsheets”.
Bill Bekenn and Ray Hooper draw upon the Toyota automotive manufacturing methodology to describe a set of techniques “Poka Yoke” – Japanese for “Mistake Proofing” – to reduce the possibility of making mistakes in the first place.
