Migrating Legacy Spreadsheets-Based Systems to Web MVC Architecture: An Industrial Case Study

The use of spreadsheets to implement Information Systems is widespread in industry. Scripting languages and ad-hoc frameworks (e.g., Visual Basic for Applications) for Rapid Application Development are often exploited by organizations to quickly develop Spreadsheets-based Information Systems for supporting the information management of their business processes. Maintenance tasks on these systems can be very difficult and cause a remarkable worsening of the overall system quality. To prevent these issues, the migration of such systems to new architectures may be a valid solution. In this paper we present our experience in migrating an Excel spreadsheet-based system to a Web application based on a MVC architecture. The proposed approach was successfully applied in a real context of a company operating in the automotive industry.