Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by twic on Thursday November 30, 2017 @06:15PM (#15820545)

In my experience, the fact there is a human being staring at the output all day goes a long way towards mitigating the lack of automatic tests.

As programmers, we write tests because we can't see what's happening inside the program while it's at work, so we have to give it a thorough exam before letting it do that. Spreadsheet jockeys can take a radically different approach to validation.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by bonesss on Friday December 01, 2017 @07:35AM (#15823440)

There's also a bevy of issues that impact programmed systems that (in theory!), don't apply to Excel.

I can't guarantee the a programs output will be the same after every VM patch, component update, re-deployment, or even just re-compile. Generally we have multiple devs touching the same system, or same code. Generally we want that code to be robust in the face of reuse in other components and contexts. Generally we have no ability to see production errors unless they are properly logged and monitored, etc.

Worst of all I, a subject expert in nerdy things, am implementing a model in a domain I am an amateur in and have no fundamental context for assessing.

A spreadsheet jockey inverts all those problems. They know what they want, and are intimately connected to its operation.

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