Measuring maintainability of spreadsheets in the wild

Several studies have shown how spreadsheets are pervasive in many organizations as a form of end-user programming. Despite their importance and long lifespan, they are seldom developed with maintenance concerns in mind, and organizations have no efficient way of estimating the risk they present. In this paper we take a first step towards automated assessment of spreadsheet maintainability. We use the Goal Question Metric approach to select metrics relevant for maintainability and apply the selected metrics to a spreadsheet corpus in order to study their behavior "in the wild". We observe that the majority of the metrics behave in the same way as similar ones for traditional software systems, which means that existing methodologies to assess maintainability can be applied to spreadsheets as well. This opens the possibility of creating instruments for organizations that rely on spreadsheets to start actively managing their maintainability.