Evolutionary Reshaping of an End-User Program into Professional Software: A Case Study

Abstract

Although the rate of significant quality issues in enduser programs is alarming, high-stake business decisions are often influenced by them. But due to a lack of awareness the end-user programs manage to stay below the radar of today’s managers and vital reengineering actions never get projected. This case study describes a project in which preceding business process reengineering triggered software reengineering of a complex financial accounting spreadsheet. As closer domain analysis indicated severe quality and task inadequacy problems in this piece of software, it was decided to fully redevelop the application instead of just reengineering it. The applied two-staged evolutionary approach allowed urgently required functionality of the new system to be brought into service rapidly, while ensuring high quality in the long run.