Detecting and Visualizing Inter-Worksheet Smells in Spreadsheets

Detecting and Visualizing Inter-Worksheet Smells in Spreadsheets

Hermans, F.
Pinger, M.
Van Deursen, A.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Technology

2011-06-02

Spreadsheets are often used in business, for simple tasks, as well as for mission critical tasks such as finance or forecasting. Similar to software, some spreadsheets are of better quality than others, for instance with respect to usability, maintainability or reliability. In contrast with software however, spreadsheets are rarely checked, tested or certified. In this paper, we aim at developing an approach for detecting smells that indicate weak points in a spreadsheet’s design. To that end we first study code smells and transform these code smells to their spreadsheet counterparts. We then present an approach to detect the smells, and communicate located smells to spreadsheet users with data flow diagrams. We analyzed occurrences of these smells in the Euses corpus. Furthermore we conducted ten case studies in an industrial setting. The results of the evaluation indicate that smells can indeed reveal weaknesses in a spreadsheet’s design, and that data flow diagrams are an appropriate way to show those weaknesses. Paper presented at: ICSE 2012, the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering, June 2-9, 2012 in Zurich, Switzerland.

code smells
refactoring
data flow diagrams

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ef3a8486-f88e-4d05-a749-1d288363b8b1

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

1872-5392

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2011-029

Institutional Repository

report

(c) 2011 The authors. Software Engineering Research Group, Department of Software Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology.