arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to David Colver.
A review of 75 formal audit assignments shows that the effort taken to identify defects in financial models taken from the domain of limited recourse (project) finance is uncorrelated with common measures of the physical characteristics of the spreadsheets concerned.
A common application of spreadsheets is the development of models that deliver projections of the future financial statements of companies established to pursue ventures that are subject to project financing. A survey of 11 such spreadsheets prepared by a range of organisations shows that the amount of self-testing included in such models ranges between one formula of testing for each three formulae of calculation, down to essentially no self-testing at all.
Various techniques for developing spreadsheet models greatly improve the chance that the end result will not contain basic mechanical errors. However, for every discipline in which a given technique is useful, there is likely to be another in which the same technique works badly. As a result, the author urges that EuSpRIG does not succumb to internal or external pressures to champion a particular set of "best practices", because no such set is optimal in all spreadsheet applications.
Inclusion analysis is the name given by Operis to a black box testing technique that it has found to make the checking of key financial ratios calculated by spreadsheet models quicker, easier and more likely to find omission errors than code inspection.