A Maintainability Checklist for Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are widely used in industry, because they are flexible and easy to use. Often, they are even used for business-critical applications. It is however difficult for spreadsheet users to correctly assess the maintainability of spreadsheets. Maintainability of spreadsheets is important, since spreadsheets often have a long lifespan, during which they are used by several users. In this paper, we present a checklist aimed at measuring the maintainability of a spreadsheet. This is achieved via asking several questions, and can indicate whether the spreadsheet is safe to use now and in the future. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on 11 spreadsheets from the EUSES corpus.