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...

Dependence tracing techniques for spreadsheets: An investigation

Spreadsheet cells contain data but also may contain formulas that refer to data from other cells, perform operations on them, and render the results directly to show it to the user. In order to understand the structure of spreadsheets, one needs to understand the formulas that control cell-to-cell dataflow. Understanding this cell-to-cell inter...