Fun fact: Toshiba has software that generates entire CRUD app skeletons driven 100% by excel spreadsheets. You fill out object definitions in excel spreadsheets with property names and data types etc. It's like an extremely uncool long lost cousin of rails -g
Source: Got one of their engineers to show me after I heard about it and had to know if it was real.
Anyone who's ever worked with or in Japan knows just how far they are willing to torture Excel spreadsheets to get them to do anything and everything.
I've (miss)used excel as a web-service testing platform once. The test data (input/expected output) was anyway in the Excel sheet, so why not. We did not have other software available at the time, so Excel+VBA it is.
It was one of my nicest testing gigs ever. A test session would take only minutes, all results documented to the t. And fiddling around with the test data was so easy. Would be interesting to know if this thing is still in use.
Not sure the customer liked it that much, I regression tested the 6 previous - still running - versions of the service, something no one had cared to do for years. We found bugs both in the Spec and in the Code for nearly all old versions...
>I've (miss)used excel as a web-service testing platform once. The test data (input/expected output) was anyway in the Excel sheet, so why not. We did not have other software available at the time, so Excel+VBA it is.
That's an upgrade on how Toshiba did testing. They did basically the same thing except it was Excel+Humans. No joke. Never saw that one with my own eyes but a coworker did. He also said they had doctors there and each doctor was responsible for X number of staff and every so often made them fill out a questionnaire of which the final question was "have you thought about killing yourself lately?" and if you answered yes you got a day off. Apparently people would ask for transfers to different offices where the doctor responsible for them wasn't physically present, so they could avoid even being asked the question for fear of being made to take time off work. One of the more senior guys on the project kinda just disappeared too. Fun times.
to play devil's advocate, i had a desktop support job in college and worked with an executive assistance. She was _very_ attractive and so i was at her desk "working on the printer" a lot, she knew Excel better than anyone i've ever seen (before or since). It was like watching a magician.
Source: Got one of their engineers to show me after I heard about it and had to know if it was real.
Anyone who's ever worked with or in Japan knows just how far they are willing to torture Excel spreadsheets to get them to do anything and everything.