The Effect of a Block-based Language on Formula Comprehension in Spreadsheets

The use of spreadsheets in industry is widespread. It is known that spreadsheets have an average life span of five years, and during this life span, they are used on average by thirteen different persons. Consequently, spreadsheets need maintenance, and knowledge about the spreadsheet needs to be transferred from one user to another. To minimize...

Detecting and refactoring code smells in spreadsheet formula

Preprint of article published in: Empirical Software Engineering, February 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York, doi:10.1007/s10664-013-9296-2 Spreadsheets are used extensively in business processes around the world and just like software, spreadsheets are changed throughout their lifetime causing understandability and maintainability...

Analyzing and Visualizing Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are used extensively in industry: they are the number one tool for financial analysis and are also prevalent in other domains, such as logistics and planning. Their flexibility and immediate feedback make them easy to use for non-programmers. But as easy as spreadsheets are to build, so difficult can they be to analyze and adapt....

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...

Supporting professional spreadsheet users by generating leveled dataflow diagrams

Thanks to their flexibility and intuitive programming model, spreadsheets are widely used in industry, often for businesscritical applications. Similar to software developers, professional spreadsheet users demand support for maintaining and transferring their spreadsheets. In this paper, we first study the problems and information needs of...