Toward Sharing Reasoning to Improve Fault Localization in Spreadsheets

Although researchers have developed several ways to reason about the location of faults in spreadsheets, no single form of reasoning is without limitations. Multiple types of errors can appear in spreadsheets, and various fault localization techniques differ in the kinds of errors that they are effective in locating. Because end users who debug spreadsheets consistently follow the advice of fault localization systems [9], it is important to ensure that fault localization feedback corresponds as closely as possible to where the faults actually appear. In this paper, we describe an emerging system that attempts to improve fault localization for end-user programmers by sharing the results of the reasoning systems found in WYSIWYT [13, 14] and UCheck [1, 6]. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the reasoning found in each system, we expect to identify where different forms of reasoning complement one another, when different forms of reasoning contradict one another, and which heuristics can be used to select the best advice from each system. By using multiple forms of reasoning in conjunction with heuristics to choose among recommendations from each system, we expect to produce unified fault localization feedback whose combination is better than the sum of the parts.