Smelling Faults in Spreadsheets

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2014

Authors

Rui Abreu (Author) FEUP; Jácome Cunha (Author) Other; João Paulo Fernandes (Author) Other; Pedro Martins (Author) Other; Alexandre Perez (Author) Other; João Saraiva (Author) Other

Conference proceedings International

Title: 30th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, Victoria, BC, Canada, September 29 - October 3, 2014

Pages: 111-120

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 25 Citations

Scopus - 30 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00A-8VT

DOI: 10.1109/icsme.2014.33

Abstract (EN): Despite being staggeringly error prone, spreadsheets are a highly flexible programming environment that is widely used in industry. In fact, spreadsheets are widely adopted for decision making, and decisions taken upon wrong (spreadsheet-based) assumptions may have serious economical impacts on businesses, among other consequences. This paper proposes a technique to automatically pinpoint potential faults in spreadsheets. It combines a catalog of spreadsheet smells that provide a first indication of a potential fault, with a generic spectrum-based fault localization strategy in order to improve (in terms of accuracy and false positive rate) on these initial results. Our technique has been implemented in a tool which helps users detecting faults. To validate the proposed technique, we consider a well-known and well-documented catalog of faulty spreadsheets. Our experiments yield two main results: we were able to distinguish between smells that can point to faulty cells from smells and those that are not capable of doing so; and we provide a technique capable of detecting a significant number of errors: two thirds of the cells labeled as faulty are in fact (documented) errors.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 10