Toward Reverse Engineering of VBA Based Excel Spreadsheet Applications
This tackles maintenance challenges for practitioners using complex spreadsheet applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing reverse engineering concepts.
The paper addresses the difficulty of maintaining undocumented spreadsheet applications by proposing reverse engineering techniques to extract conceptual data and business logic models.
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 models and business logic models.