Study finds 94% of business spreadsheets have critical errors(phys.org)
phys.org
Study finds 94% of business spreadsheets have critical errors
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical-errors.html
2 comments
There's a long history of spreadsheet errors and literature on same going back a few decades now.
The problem with Excel is that whilst it's an easy development environment, and a vastly flexible one, it's absolute death to debug.
In a business sim class in college a couple of decades back, I discovered that the Lotus spreadsheets (as I said: a couple of decades back) had a totalling error which double-counted individual row totals in the bottom line (everything was twice as profitable as the spreadsheet indicated).
At an early gig, one of the senior developers instituted a practice of code walkthroughs on projects (only a subset of them). One of these involved, you guessed it, a spreadsheet (we used a number of other development tools for much of our work), in this case Excel. Again, numerous errors which substantively changed the outcome of the analysis. One of the walkthrough leader's observations was that you could replace all of the in-cell coding with a VBA macro making debugging far easier (all the code and data are separated and in one place each).
The particular analyst whose project this was: he insisted to the very end that this "wasn't a program" and he "wasn't a programmer" and that the walkthrough didn't apply to his situation. Despite the errors found and corrections made.
At the time (mid 1990s) the walkthrough lead turned up a paper from a researcher in Hawaii on the topic. I'm not certain it was Raymond Panko, but his 2008 paper (a revise of a 1998 work) discusses the matter in depth, and finds 94% of spreadsheets have errors, with a 5.2% cell error rate:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20070617041554/panko.shidler.haw...>
Panko is now professor emeritus at the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii:
<https://shidler.hawaii.edu/itm/directory/raymond-r-panko>
Poon et al, authors of the study referenced in TFA, cite Panko numerous times.
Direct link to Poon: <https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11704-023-238...> (PDF).
(I've been noting this prior art on HN for over a decade now: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.)
The problem with Excel is that whilst it's an easy development environment, and a vastly flexible one, it's absolute death to debug.
In a business sim class in college a couple of decades back, I discovered that the Lotus spreadsheets (as I said: a couple of decades back) had a totalling error which double-counted individual row totals in the bottom line (everything was twice as profitable as the spreadsheet indicated).
At an early gig, one of the senior developers instituted a practice of code walkthroughs on projects (only a subset of them). One of these involved, you guessed it, a spreadsheet (we used a number of other development tools for much of our work), in this case Excel. Again, numerous errors which substantively changed the outcome of the analysis. One of the walkthrough leader's observations was that you could replace all of the in-cell coding with a VBA macro making debugging far easier (all the code and data are separated and in one place each).
The particular analyst whose project this was: he insisted to the very end that this "wasn't a program" and he "wasn't a programmer" and that the walkthrough didn't apply to his situation. Despite the errors found and corrections made.
At the time (mid 1990s) the walkthrough lead turned up a paper from a researcher in Hawaii on the topic. I'm not certain it was Raymond Panko, but his 2008 paper (a revise of a 1998 work) discusses the matter in depth, and finds 94% of spreadsheets have errors, with a 5.2% cell error rate:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20070617041554/panko.shidler.haw...>
Panko is now professor emeritus at the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii:
<https://shidler.hawaii.edu/itm/directory/raymond-r-panko>
Poon et al, authors of the study referenced in TFA, cite Panko numerous times.
Direct link to Poon: <https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11704-023-238...> (PDF).
(I've been noting this prior art on HN for over a decade now: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.)
Business peeps: Oh no, we are in danger!
Software engineers: (nodding wisely) Only 94% have critical errors? Not bad!