Toward an Integrated Framework for Declarative and Interactive Spreadsheet Debugging

Dietmar Jannach, Arash Baharloo, David Williamson

2013

Abstract

Spreadsheet applications can nowadays be found nearly everywhere in companies and are used for a variety of purposes. Because of the high risk that arises when business decisions are based on faulty spreadsheets, in recent years new approaches for spreadsheet quality assurance have been proposed. Among them are techniques that allow for more intelligent tool support during the spreadsheet test and debugging process. The design and evaluation of such new methods and tools, which are for example based on model-based techniques is however challenging. On the one hand, real-world spreadsheets can be large and complex, thus requiring highly efficient and scalable error-location algorithms. On the other hand, as spreadsheets are usually developed by non-programmers, special care has to be taken when designing the debugging user interface. In this paper, we discuss these challenges and present the design and architecture of an integrated framework for spreadsheet debugging called Exquisite. Furthermore, we report details and first experimental results of a constraint-based debugging approach implemented in the framework, which supports the automated identification of possible spreadsheet errors based on user-provided test cases and model-based diagnosis techniques.

References

  1. Abraham, R. and Erwig, M. (2006). Autotest: A tool for automatic test case generation in spreadsheets. In Proc. VLHCC 7806, pages 43-50, Brighton, UK.
  2. Abraham, R. and Erwig, M. (2007). GoalDebug: A spreadsheet debugger for end users. In Proceedings ICSE 7807, pages 251-260, Minneapolis, USA.
  3. Abraham, R. and Erwig, M. (2009). Mutation operators for spreadsheets. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., 35(1):94-108.
  4. Abreu, R., Riboira, A., and Wotawa, F. (2012). Constraintbased debugging of spreadsheets. In Proc. CIbSE 2012, pages 1-14.
  5. Brown, P. S. and Gould, J. D. (1987). An experimental study of people creating spreadsheets. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst., 5(3):258-272.
  6. Burnett, M., Sheretov, A., Ren, B., and Rothermel, G. (2002). Testing homogeneous spreadsheet grids with the ”what you see is what you test” methodology. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., 28(6):576-594.
  7. Chadwick, D., Knight, B., and Rajalingham, K. (2001). Quality control in spreadsheets: A visual approach using color codings to reduce errors in formulae. Software Quality Control, 9(2):133-143.
  8. Console, L., Friedrich, G., and Dupré, D. T. (1993). Modelbased diagnosis meets error diagnosis in logic programs. In Proc. IJCAI 7893, pages 1494-1499, Chambery.
  9. Felfernig, A., Friedrich, G., Jannach, D., and Stumptner, M. (2004). Consistency-based diagnosis of configuration knowledge bases. Artif. Intell., 152(2):213-234.
  10. Friedrich, G., Stumptner, M., and Wotawa, F. (1999). Model-based diagnosis of hardware designs. Artif. Intell., 111(1-2):3-39.
  11. Galletta, D. F., Abraham, D., Louadi, M. E., Lekse, W., Pollalis, Y. A., and Sampler, J. L. (1993). An empirical study of spreadsheet error-finding performance. Accounting, Management and Inf Techn, 3(2):79 - 95.
  12. Hermans, F., Pinzger, M., and van Deursen, A. (2012). Detecting code smells in spreadsheet formulas. In Proc. ICSM, Riva del Garda.
  13. Hofer, B., Riboira, A., Wotawa, F., Abreu, R., and Getzner, E. (2013). On the empirical evaluation of fault localization techniques for spreadsheets. In Proc. FASE 2013, Rome, Italy.
  14. Jannach, D. and Engler, U. (2010). Toward model-based debugging of spreadsheet programs. In Proc. JCKBSE 7810, pages 252-264, Kaunas, Lithuania.
  15. Junker, U. (2004). Quickxplain: Preferred explanations and relaxations for over-constrained problems. In Proceedings AAAI'04, pages 167-172.
  16. Mateis, C., Stumptner, M., Wieland, D., and Wotawa, F. (2000). Model-based debugging of Java programs. In Proc. AADEBUG.
  17. Panko, R. R. (1998). What we know about spreadsheet errors. J. End User Comput., 10(2):15-21.
  18. Panko, R. R. and Port, D. N. (2012). End user computing: The dark matter (and dark energy) of corporate IT. In Proc. HICSS 7812, pages 4603-4612.
  19. Pemberton, J. and Robson, A. (2000). Spreadsheets in business. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 100(8):379-388.
  20. Powell, S. G., Baker, K. R., and Lawson, B. (2008). A critical review of the literature on spreadsheet errors. Decis. Support Syst., 46(1):128-138.
  21. Reichwein, J., Rothermel, G., and Burnett, M. (1999). Slicing spreadsheets: an integrated methodology for spreadsheet testing and debugging. In Proceedings DSL'99, pages 25-38, Austin, Texas.
  22. Reiter, R. (1987). A theory of diagnosis from first principles. Artif. Intell., 32(1):57-95.
  23. Rothermel, G., Li, L., Dupuis, C., and Burnett, M. (1998). What you see is what you test: a methodology for testing form-based visual programs. In Proc. ICSE 1998, pages 198 -207.
  24. Shchekotykhin, K., Friedrich, G., Fleiss, P., and Rodler, P. (2012). Interactive ontology debugging: Two query strategies for efficient fault localization. Journal of Web Semantics, 1213:88 - 103.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Jannach D., Baharloo A. and Williamson D. (2013). Toward an Integrated Framework for Declarative and Interactive Spreadsheet Debugging . In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-8565-62-4, pages 117-124. DOI: 10.5220/0004410601170124


in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase13,
author={Dietmar Jannach and Arash Baharloo and David Williamson},
title={Toward an Integrated Framework for Declarative and Interactive Spreadsheet Debugging},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2013},
pages={117-124},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004410601170124},
isbn={978-989-8565-62-4},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Toward an Integrated Framework for Declarative and Interactive Spreadsheet Debugging
SN - 978-989-8565-62-4
AU - Jannach D.
AU - Baharloo A.
AU - Williamson D.
PY - 2013
SP - 117
EP - 124
DO - 10.5220/0004410601170124