Tag Archives: innovation

Managing Complex Spreadsheets — The Story of PerfectXL

Posted in Research, Society by

This week we finished grading of the software architecture course I’m teaching.

Like many teachers, I use a spreadsheet for grading together with my co-teachers and teaching assistants. In this case, we concurrently worked with five people on a Google Spreadsheet. The resulting spreadsheet is quite interesting:

  • The spreadsheet currently has 22 sheets (tabs)

  • There are input sheets for basic information on the over one hundred students in the class, the groups they form, and the rubrics we use.

  • There are input sheets from various forms the students used to enter course-related information

  • There are input sheets for different sub-assignments, which the teachers and assistants use to enter subgrades for each rubric: Some grades are individual, others are per team. Such sheets also contain basic formulas to compute grades from rubrics.

  • There are overview sheets collecting the sub-grades from various sheets, combining them to overall grades. The corresponding formulas can become quite tricky, involving rounding, lookups, sumproducts, thresholds, conditional logic based on absence or presence of certain grades, etc.

  • There are various output sheets, to report grades to students, to export grades to the university’s administrative systems, and to offer diagrams showing grade distributions for educational assessments of the course.

The spreadsheet used has a history of five years: Each year we take the existing one, copy it, and remove the student data. We then adjust it to the changes we made to the course (additional assignments, new grading policies, better rubrics, etc).

Visualization of sheet dependencies

All in all, this spreadsheet has grown quite complex, and it is easy to make a mistake. For example, I once released incorrect grades — a rather stressful event both for my students and myself. And all I did wrong was forgetting the infamous false argument needed in a vlookup — despite the fact that I was well aware of this “feature”. For the this year’s spreadsheet we had duplicate student ids, in a column where each row had to be unique, leading to a missing grade, and again extra effort and stress to resolve this as soon as possible.

I suspect that if you use spreadsheets seriously, for example for grading, you recognize the characteristics of my spreadsheet — and maybe your sheets are even more complicated.

Now I have an interest in spreadsheets that goes beyond that of the casual user: As a software engineering researcher, I have looked extensively at spreadsheets. I did this together with Felienne Hermans, first when she was doing her PhD under my supervision in the context of the Perplex project (co-funded by Microsoft) and then in the context of the Prose project (funded by the Dutch STW agency). From a research perspective, these projects were certainly successful, leading to a series of publications in such venues as ECOOP 2010, ICSE 2011-2013, ICSM, EMSE, and SANER.

But we did our research not just to publish papers: We also had (and have) the ambition to actually help the working spreadsheet user, as well as large organizations that depend on spreadsheets for business-critical decision making.

To that end, we founded a company, Infotron, which offers tooling, services, consultancy, and training to help organizations and individuals become more effective with their spreadsheets.

After several years of operating somewhat under the radar, the Infotron team (headed by CEO Matéo Mol) has now launched an on line service, PerfectXL, in which users can upload a spreadsheet and get it analyzed. The service then helps in the following ways:

  • PerfectXL can visualize the architectural dependencies between sheets, as shown above for my course sheet;
  • PerfectXL can identify risks (such as the vlookup I mentioned, interrupted ranges, or overly complex conditional logic);
  • PerfectXL can assess the structure and quality of the formulas in your sheet.

If this sounds interesting, you can try out the service for free at perfectxl.com. There are various pricing options that help Infotron run and further grow this service — pick the subscription that suits you and your organization best!

Even if you decide not to use the PerfectXL service, the site contains a lot of generally useful information, such as various hints and tips on how to create and maintain well-structured spreadsheets.

Enjoy!

Test Automation Day 2014

Posted in Development by

One of the software testing events in The Netherlands I like a lot is the Test Automation Day. It is a one day event, which in 2014 will take place on June 19 in Rotterdam. The day will be packed with (international) speakers, with presentations targeting developers, testers, as well as as management.

Test automation is a broad topic: it aims at offering tool support for software testing processes where ever this is possible. This raises a number of challenging questions:

  • What are the costs and benefits of software test automation? When and why should I apply a given technique?
  • What tools and techniques are available? What are their limitations and how can they be improved?
  • How can automation be applied in such areas as test execution, test case design, test input generation, test output evaluation, and test suite optimization?

squerist

The Test Automation Day was initiated four years ago by Squerist, and organized by CKC Seminars. In the past years, it has brought together over 200 test experts each year. During those years, we have built up some good traditions:

  • We have been able to attract some wonderful keynote speakers, including Scott Barber (performance testing, 2011, 2012), Elfriede Dustin (test automation for the DoD, 2012), Walter Belgers (security, 2012), Mieke Gevers (Agile processes, 2013) Lionel Briand (model-based testing, 2013), Emily Bache (future of test automation, 2013). For 2014, we are in the process of keynote selection and invitation.

  • A mixture of Dutch and international speakers.

  • Coverage of a broad range of topics in parallel tracks.

Workshop with Scott Barber

  • A mixture of different formats, including workshops, keynotes, a hands-on testlab, and tutorials, by such experts as Dorothy Graham, Steve Freeman, and Matt Heuser.

  • Presentations from industry (testers, developers, client organizations) and universities (new research results, tools and techniques), with a focus on practical applicability.

  • A mixture of invited (keynote) presentations, open contributions that can be submitted by anyone working in the area of software test automation, and sponsored presentations.

  • Pre-conference events, which this year will be in the form of a masterclass on Wednesday June 18.

This year’s call for contributions is still open. If you do something cool in the area of software test automation, please submit a proposal for a presentation! Deadline Monday December 2, 2013!

You are very much welcome to submit your proposal. Your proposal will be evaluated by the international TADNL program committee, who will look at the timeliness, innovation, technical content, and inspiration that the audience will draw from your presentation. Also, if you have suggestions for a keynote you would like to hear at TADNL2014, please send me an email!

This year’s special theme is test automation innovation: so if you’re work with or working on some exciting new test automation method or technique, make sure you submit a paper!

We look forward to your contributions, and to seeing you in Rotterdam in June 2014!

Test Automation Day 2013

Dimensions of Innovation

Posted in Research by

ECSS Amsterdam

As an academic in software engineering, I want to make the engineering of software more effective so that society can benefit even more from the amazing potential of software.

This requires not just good research, but also success in innovation: ensuring that research ideas are adopted in society. Why is innovation so hard? How can we increase innovation in software engineering and computer science alike? What can universities do to increase their innovation success rate?

I was made to rethink these questions when Informatics Europe contacted me to co-organize this year’s European Computer Science Summit (ECSS 2013) with special theme Informatics and Innovation.

Informatics Europe is an organization of Computer Science Departments in Europe, founded in 2005. Its mission is to foster the development of quality research and teaching in information and computer sciences, also known as Informatics. In its yearly summit, deans and heads of department get together, to share experience in leading academic groups, and to join forces when undertaking new activities at a European level.

When Informatics Europe asked me as program chair of their two day summit, my only answer could be “yes”. I have a long term interest in innovation, and here I had the opportunity and freedom to compile a full featured program on innovation as I saw fit, with various keynotes, panels, and presentations by participants — a wonderful assignment.

In compiling the program I took the words of Peter Denning as starting point: “an idea that changes no one’s behavior is only an invention, not an innovation.” In other words, innovation is about changing people, which is much harder than coming up with a clever idea.

In the end, I came up with the following “Dimensions of Innovations” that guided the composition of the program.

  1. Startups

    Innovation needs optimists who believe they can change the world. One of the best ways to bring a crazy new idea to sustainable success is by starting a new company dedicated to creating and conquering markets that had not existed before.

    Many of the activities at ECSS 2013 relate to startups. The opening keynote is by François Bancilhon, serial entrepreneur currently working in the field of open data. Furthermore, we have Heleen Kist, strategy consultant in the area of access to finance. Last but not least, the first day includes a panel, specifically devoted to entrepreneurship, and one of the pre-summit workshops is entirely devoted to entrepreneurship for faculty.

  2. Patents

    Patents are traditionally used to protect (possibly large) investments that may be required for successful innovation. In computer science, patents are more than problematic, as evidenced by patent trolls, fights between giants such as Oracle and Google, and the differences in regulations in the US and in Europe. Yet at the same time (software) patents can be crucial, for example to attract investors for a startup.

    Several of the ECSS keynote speakers have concrete experience with patents — Pamela Zave at AT&T, and Erik Meijer from his time at Microsoft, when he co-authored hundreds of patents. Furthermore, Yannis Skulikaris of the European Patent Office will survey patenting of software-related inventions.

  3. Open Source, Open Data

    An often overlooked dimension of innovation are open source and open data. How much money can be made by giving away software, or by allowing other to freely use your data? Yet, many enterprises are immensely successful based on open source and open data.

    At ECSS, keynote speaker Erik Meijer is actively working on a series of open source projects (related to his work on reactive programming). In the area of open data, we have entrpreneur François Bancilhon, and semantic web specialist Frank van Harmelen, who is head of the Network Institute of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam

  4. Teaching for Innovation

    How can universities use education to strengthen innovation? What should students learn so that they can become ambassadors of change? How innovative should students be so that they can become successful in society? At the same time, how can outreach and education be broadened so that new groups of students are reached, for example via on line learning?

    To address these questions, at ECSS we have Anka Mulder, member of the executive board of Delft University of Technology, and former president of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. She is responsible for the TU Delft strategy on Massive On-Line Open Courses (MOOC), and she will share TU Delft experiences in setting up their MOOCs.

    Furthermore, ECSS will host a panel discussion, in which experienced yet non-conformist teachers and managers will share their experience in innovative teaching to foster innovation.

  5. Fostering Innovation

    Policy makers and university management are often at loss on how to encourage their stubborn academics to contribute to innovation, the “third pillar” of academia.

    Therefore, ECSS is a place for university managers to meet, as evidenced by the pre-summit Workshop for Deans, Department Chairs and Research Directors . Furthermore, we have executive board member Anka Mulder as speaker.

    Last but not least, we have Carl-Cristian Buhr, member of the cabinet of Digital Agenda Commissioner and EU Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes, who will speak about the EU Horizon 2020 programme and its relevance to computer science research, education, and innovation.

  6. Inspriational Content

    All talk about innovation is void without inspirational content. Therefore, throughout the conference, exciting research insights and new course examples will be interwoven in the presentations.

    For example, we have Pamela Zave speaking on The Power of Abstraction, Frank van Harmelen addressing progress in his semantic web work at the Network Institute, and Felienne Hermans on how to reach thousands of people through social media. Last but not least we have Erik Meijer, who is never scared to throw both math and source code in his presentation.

The summit will take place October 7–9, 2013, in Amsterdam. You are all welcome to join!

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Update:

  • The slides I used for opening ECSS 2013

David Notkin on Why We Publish

Posted in Research, Teaching by

This week David Notkin (1955-2013) passed away, after a long battle against cancer. He was one of my heroes. He did great research on discovering invariants, reflexion models, software architecture, clone analysis, and more. His 1986 Gandalf paper was one of the first I studied when starting as a PhD student in 1990.

December 2011 David sent me an email in which he expressed interest to do a sabbatical in our TU Delft Software Engineering Research Group in 2013-2014. I was as proud as one can be. Unfortunately, half a year later he had to cancel his plans due to his health.

David was loved by many, as he had a genuine interest in people: developers, software users, researchers, you. And he was a great (friendly and persistent) organizer — 3 weeks ago he still answered my email on ICSE 2013 organizational matters.

In February 2013, he wrote a beautiful editorial for the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, entitled Looking Back. His opening reads: “It is bittersweet to pen my final editorial”. Then David continues to address the question why it is that we publish:

“… I’d like very much for each and every reader, contributor, reviewer, and editor to remember that the publications aren’t primarily for promotions, or for citation counts, or such.

Rather, the intent is to make the engineering of software more effective so that society can benefit even more from the amazing potential of software.

It is sometimes hard to see this on a day-to-day basis given the many external pressures that we all face. But if we never see this, what we do has little value to society. If we care about influence, as I hope we do, then adding value to society is the real measure we should pursue.

Of course, this isn’t easy to quantify (as are many important things in life, such as romance), and it’s rarely something a single individual can achieve even in a lifetime. But BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) are themselves of value, and we should never let them fade far from our minds and actions.”

Dear David, we will miss you very much.

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