Spreadsheets are tools to model personal, business and scientific data and to support decision-making based on such models. Moreover, spreadsheets are used for communicating data, models, and decisions, which makes the interpretability of spreadsheet intents an important consideration in the design of spreadsheet interaction. In this paper we will focus on the problem of model assessment, i.e.,...

Purpose − An alarming number of spreadsheet faults have been reported in the literature, indicating that effective and easy-to-apply spreadsheet testing techniques are not available for “non-technical”, end-user programmers. This paper aims to alleviate the problem by introducing a metamorphic testing (MT) technique for spreadsheets. Design/methodology/approach − The paper discussed four common...

Using spreadsheets is the preferred method to calculate, display or store anything that fits into a table-like structure. They are often used by end users to create applications, although they have one critical drawback—spreadsheets are very error-prone. Recent research has developed methods to reduce this error-proneness by introducing a new way of object-oriented modeling of spreadsheets befo...

This paper presents work conducted towards the development of an effective software engineering-based methodology for integrity control in the process of spreadsheet development. Various approaches and concepts within the discipline of software engineering are investigated. The proposed methodology consists of a set of coherent stages incorporating relevant software engineering techniques and p...

Electronic spreadsheets have made a major contribution to financial analysis and problem solving processes. Decisions made using these tools often involve substantive consequences for the organizations. However, academic literature reveals that experienced professionals and students make many errors when developing spreadsheets. Practitioners recognize the importance of accuracy and have publis...

Article history: Received 8 December 2006 Received in revised form 20 May 2008 Accepted 2 June 2008 Available online 7 June 2008 Among those who study spreadsheet use, it is widely accepted that errors are prevalent in operational spreadsheets and that errors can lead to poor decisions and cost millions of dollars. However, relatively little is known about what types of errors actually occur, h...

Until now, attempts to extend the one-way constraint evaluation model of the spreadsheet paradigm to support complex objects, such as colored circles or user-defined types, have led to approaches featuring either a direct way of creating objects graphically or strong compatibility with the spreadsheet paradigm, but not both. This inability to conveniently go beyond numbers and strings without s...

This paper describes an exploratory empirical study of the effect of named ranges on spreadsheet debugging performance. Named ranges are advocated in both academia and industry, yet no experimental evidence has been cited to back up these recommendations. This paper describes an exploratory experiment involving 21 participants that assesses the performance of novices debugging a spreadsheet con...

Spreadsheet programs are widely used in industrial practice. As they are often developed not by IT professionals but by end users, particular attention has to be paid to quality control and testing and appropriate methods for fault prevention, fault localization and repair for spreadsheet programs have to be developed. In this paper, we propose to apply model-based diagnosis techniques for the ...

Thanks to their flexibility and intuitive programming model, spreadsheets are widely used in industry, often for business-critical applications. Similar to software developers, professional spreadsheet users demand support for understanding spreadsheets, and analyzing their quality. This paper describes Breviz, a tool that visualizes spreadsheets as leveled dataflow diagrams, showing users all ...