Adding Spreadsheets to the MDE Toolkit

Spreadsheets are widely used to support software development activities. They have been used to collect requirements and software defects, to capture traceability information between requirements and test cases, and in general, to fill in gaps that are not covered satisfactorily by more specialised tools. Despite their widespread use, spreadsheets have received little attention from researchers in the field of Model Driven Engineering. In this paper, we argue for the usefulness of model management support for querying and modifying spreadsheets, we identify the conceptual gap between contemporary model management languages and spreadsheets, and we propose an approach for bridging it. We present a prototype that builds atop the Epsilon and Google Drive platforms and we evaluate the proposed approach through a case study that involves validating and transforming software requirements captured using spreadsheets.