Measuring Spreadsheet Formula Understandability

Measuring Spreadsheet Formula Understandability

Hermans, F.F.J.
Pinzger, M.
Van Deursen, A.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Computer Technology

2012-12-31

Spreadsheets are widely used in industry, because they are flexible and easy to use. Often they are used for business-critical applications. It is however difficult for spreadsheet users to correctly assess the quality of spreadsheets, especially with respect to the understandability. Understandability of spreadsheets is important, since spreadsheets often have a long lifespan, during which they are used by several users. In this paper, we establish a set of spreadsheet understandability metrics. We start by studying related work and interviewing 40 spreadsheet professionals to obtain a set of characteristics that might contribute to understandability problems in spreadsheets. Based on those characteristics we subsequently determine a number of understandability metrics. To evaluate the usefulness of our metrics, we conducted a series of experiments in which professional spreadsheet users performed a number of short maintenance tasks on a set of spreadsheets from the EUSES spreadsheet corpus. The results of these tests clearly indicate that the number of ranges, the nesting depth and the presence of conditional operations in formulas significantly increase the difficulty of understanding a spreadsheet.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:06ac39c1-024d-4c4d-9f17-6ca21194fcf4

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

1872-5392

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2012-005

Institutional Repository

report

(c) 2012 The Author(s)