Pragmatic software testing education

Software testing is an important topic in software engineering education, and yet highly challenging from an educational perspective: students are required to learn several testing techniques, to be able to distinguish the right technique to apply, to evaluate the quality of their test suites, and to write maintainable test code. In this paper,...

Perceived relevance of automatic code inspection in end-user development: A study on VBA

Microsoft VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is a programming language widely used by end-user programmers, often alongside the popular spreadsheet software Excel. Together they form the popular Excel-VBA application ecosystem. Despite being popular, spreadsheets are known to be fault-prone, and to minimize risk of faults in the overall...

On the Effectiveness of Automatically Inferred Invariants in Detecting Regression Faults in Spreadsheets

Automatically inferred invariants have been found to be successful in detecting regression faults in traditional software, but their application has not been explored in the context of spreadsheets. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of automatically inferred invariants in detecting regression faults in spreadsheets. We conduct an...

Spreadsheet testing in practice

Despite being popular end-user tools, spreadsheets suffer from the vulnerability of error-proneness. In software engineering, testing has been proposed as a way to address errors. It is important therefore to know whether spreadsheet users also test, or how do they test and to what extent, especially since most spreadsheet users do not have...

Supporting Spreadsheet Maintenance with Dependency Notification

Spreadsheets in the industry are used by multiple employees in organizations, and they remain in use for several years. Maintenance of existing spreadsheets is thus common. One of the issues in maintaining spreadsheets is the fact that formulas create cell dependencies, and these dependencies are invisible to users. To address this, dependence...

Evaluating Automatic Spreadsheet Metadata Extraction on a Large Set of Responses from MOOC Participants

Spreadsheets are popular end-user computing applications and one reason behind their popularity is that they offer a large degree of freedom to their users regarding the way they can structure their data. However, this flexibility also makes spreadsheets difficult to understand. Textual documentation can address this issue, yet for supporting...

Detecting and refactoring code smells in spreadsheet formulas

Spreadsheets are used extensively in business processes around the world and just like software, spreadsheets are changed throughout their lifetime causing understandability and maintainability issues. This paper adapts known code smells to spreadsheet formulas. To that end we present a list of metrics by which we can detect smelly formulas; a...

Detecting and Visualizing Inter-Worksheet Smells in Spreadsheets

Detecting Code Smells in Spreadsheet Formulas

Spreadsheets are used extensively in business processes around the world and just like software, spreadsheets are changed throughout their lifetime causing maintainability issues. This paper adapts known code smells to spreadsheet formulas. To that end we present a list of metrics by which we can detect smelly formulas and a visualization...