I have opened the Visual Basic Editor in Excel with trepidation a few times and cannot seem to get my head around developing anything in VBA. Yet, spreadsheets in general and Excel, the de-facto standard, in particular are extraordinarily useful tools. So I would love a session that gets me started on VBA and lifts my use of Excel to a new level.

I am particularly interested in knowing how to do TDD in Excel, not necessarily just with VBA, but also when using formula's.

I know there was a session a few years ago on TDD for managers based on Excel. Unfortunately, I could not attend. The idea seems good and perhaps some of that session can be recycled.

Acceptance tests, in descending order of importance:

  • being able to read and understand VBA programs of moderate complexity;
  • gain some hands-on experience developing simple VBA programs;
  • see how TDD could work when developing spreadsheets;
  • have a better understanding of some of the less obvious features of spreadsheets such as array formulae and pivot tables.
Johan Peeters
Note: InfoQ has a video of Karl Scotland and Dave Nicolette running the Manager's Introduction to Test-Driven Development at Agile 2008. They use Excel to show how TDD works.