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Conference Paper
Extension and Implementation of ClassSheet Models, Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Mendes Jorge, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Washington, DC, USA, p.19–22, (2012) Abstractvlhcc12.pdf

n this paper we explore the use of models in the context of spreadsheet engineering. We review a successful spreadsheet modeling language, whose semantics we further extend. With this extension we bring spreadsheet models closer to the business models of spreadsheets themselves. An addon for a widely used spreadsheet system, providing bidirectional model-driven spreadsheet development, was also improved to include the proposed model extension.

FaultySheet Detective: When Smells Meet Fault Localization, Abreu, Rui, Cunha Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Martins Pedro, Perez Alexandre, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 30th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, Washington, DC, USA, p.625–628, (2014) Abstracticsme14-td.pdf

This paper presents a tool, dubbed FaultySheet Detective, for aiding in spreadsheet fault localization, which combines the detection of bad smells with a generic spectrum-based fault localization algorithm.

From Relational ClassSheets to UML+OCL, Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the Software Engineering Track at the 27th Annual ACM Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC 2012), p.1151–1158, (2012) Abstractsac-se12.pdf

Spreadsheets are among the most popular programming languages in the world. Unfortunately, spreadsheet systems were not tailored from scratch with modern programming language features that guarantee, as much as possible, program correctness. As a consequence, spreadsheets are populated with unacceptable amounts of errors. In other programming language settings, model-based approaches have been proposed to increase productivity and program effectiveness. Within spreadsheets, this approach has also been followed, namely by ClassSheets. In this paper, we propose an extension to ClassSheets to allow the specification of spreadsheets that can be viewed as relational databases. Moreover, we present a transformation from ClassSheet models to UML class diagrams enriched with OCL constraints. This brings to the spreadsheet realm the entire paraphernalia of model validation techniques that are available for UML.

From Spreadsheets to Relational Databases and Back, Cunha, Jácome, Saraiva João, and Visser Joost , Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation, New York, NY, USA, p.179–188, (2009) Abstractpepm09.pdf

This paper presents techniques and tools to transform spreadsheets into relational databases and back. A set of data refinement rules is introduced to map a tabular datatype into a relational database schema. Having expressed the transformation of the two data models as data refinements, we obtain for free the functions that migrate the data. We use well-known relational database techniques to optimize and query the data. Because data refinements define bidirectional transformations we can map such database back to an optimized spreadsheet. We have implemented the data refinement rules and we have constructed tools to manipulate, optimize and refactor Excel-like spreadsheets.

GreenDroid: A Tool for Analysing Power Consumption in the Android Ecosystem, Couto, Marco, Cunha Jácome, and Fernandes João Paulo , Proceedings of the 13th International Conference Informatics’2015, Propad, Slovakia, p.73-78, (2015) informatics2015.pdf
HaExcel: A Model-Based Spreadsheet Evolution System (Poster), Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Mendes Jorge, and Saraiva João , 2011 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, September, (2011) Abstractposter.vlhcc11.png

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Helping Programmers Improve the Energy Efficiency of Source Code (Abstract/Poster), Pereira, Rui, Carção Tiago, Couto Marco, Cunha Jácome, Fernandes João P., and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017), Buenos Aires, Argentina, (2017) paper.pdfpostera3.pdf
The Influence of the Java Collection Framework on Overall Energy Consumption, Pereira, Rui, Couto Marco, Saraiva João, Cunha Jácome, and Fernandes João P. , 5th International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Software (ICSE 2016), 15-21, p.–, (2016) Abstractgreens.pdf

This paper presents a detailed study of the energy consumption of the different Java Collection Framework (JFC) implementations. For each method of an implementation in this framework, we present its energy consumption when handling different amounts of data. Knowing the greenest methods for each implementation, we present an energy optimization approach for Java programs: based on calls to JFC methods in the source code of a program, we select the greenest implementation. Finally, we present preliminary results of optimizing a set of Java programs where we obtained 6.2% energy savings.

MDSheet – Model-Driven Spreadsheets, Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Mendes Jorge, Pereira Rui, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Software Engineering methods in Spreadsheets, Volume 1209, p.31–33, (2014) Abstractsems14-td.pdf

This paper showcases MDSheet, a framework aimed at improving the engineering of spreadsheets. This framework is model-driven, and has been fully integrated under a spreadsheet system. Also, its practical interest has been demonstrated by several empirical studies.

MDSheet: A Framework for Model-driven Spreadsheet Engineering, Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Mendes Jorge, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 34rd International Conference on Software Engineering, p.1395–1398, (2012) Abstracticse12_tooldemo.pdf

n this paper, we present MDSHEET, a framework for the embedding, evolution and inference of spreadsheet models. This framework offers a model-driven software development mechanism for spreadsheet users.

Memoization for Saving Energy in Android Applications: When and how to di it, Pinto, Adriano, Couto Marco, and Cunha Jácome , (Submitted) Abstractpaper.pdf

Over the last few years, the interest in the analysis of the energy consumption of Android applications has been increasing significantly. Indeed, there are a considerable number of studies which aim at analyzing the energy consumption in various ways, such as measuring/estimating the energy consumed by an application or block of code, or even detecting energy expensive coding patterns or API's.

Nevertheless, when it comes to actually improving the energy efficiency of an application, we face a whole new challenge, which can only be achieved through source code improvements that can take advantage of energy saving techniques. However, there is still a lack of information about such techniques and their impact on energy consumption.

In this paper, we analyze the impact of the memoization technique in the energy consumption of Android applications. We present a systematic study of the use of memoization, where we compare implementations of 18 method from different applications, with and without using memoization, and measure the energy consumption of both of them. Using this approach, we are able to characterize Android methods that should be memoized.

Our results show that using memoization can clearly be a good approach for saving energy. For the 18 tested methods, 13 of them decreased significantly their energy consumption, while for the remaining 5 we observed unpredictable behavior in 3 of them and an overall increase of energy consumption in the last 2. We also included a discussion about when is actually beneficial to use memoization for saving energy, and what is the expected percentage of gain/loss when memoization works and when it does not.

Modeling the Impact of UAVs in Sustainability, Conejero, José, Brito Isabel, Moreira Ana, Cunha Jácome, and Araújo João , 5th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems (RE4SuSy) @RE16, Beijing, China, (2016) 2016-modeling-impact.pdf
Products go Green: Worst-Case Energy Consumption in Software Product Lines, Couto, Marco, Borba Paulo, Cunha Jácome, Fernandes João P., Pereira Rui, and Saraiva João , 21st International Systems and Software Product Line Conference, Sept 25-29, Sevilla, Spain, (2017) paper.pdf
A Quality Model for Spreadsheets, Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Peixoto Christophe, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology, Quality in ICT Evolution Track, p.231–236, (2012) Abstractquatic2012.pdf

In this paper we present a quality model for spreadsheets, based on the ISO/IEC 9126 standard that defines a generic quality model for software. To each of the software characteristics defined in the ISO/IEC 9126, we associate an equivalent spreadsheet characteristic. Then, we propose a set of spreadsheet specific metrics to assess the quality of a spreadsheet in each of the defined characteristics. In order to obtain the normal distribution of expected values for a spreadsheet in each of the metrics that we propose, we have executed them against all spreadsheets in the large and widely used EUSES spreadsheet corpus. Then, we quantify each characteristic of our quality model after computing the values of our metrics, and we define quality scores for the different ranges of values. Finally, to automate the atribution of a quality score to a given spreadsheet, according to our quality model, we have integrated the computation of the metrics it includes in both a batch and a web-based tool.

Querying Model-Driven Spreadsheets, Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Mendes Jorge, Pereira Rui, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Washington, DC, USA, p.83–86, (2013) Abstractvlhcc2013-query.pdf

Spreadsheets are being used with many different purposes that range from toy applications to complete information systems. In any of these cases, they are often used as data repositories that can grow significantly. As the amount of data grows, it also becomes more difficult to extract concrete information out of them. This paper focuses on the problem of spreadsheet querying. In particular, we propose an expressive and composable technique where intuitive queries can be defined. Our approach builds on a model-driven spreadsheet development environment, and queries are expressed referencing entities in the model of a spreadsheet instead of in its actual data. Finally, the system that we have implemented relies on Google's query function for spreadsheets.

QuerySheet: A Bidirectional Query Environment for Model-Driven Spreadsheets, Belo, Orlando, Cunha Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Mendes Jorge, Pereira Rui, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Washington, DC, USA, p.199–200, (2013) Abstractvlhcc2013-td.pdf

This paper presents a tool, named QUERYSHEET, to query spreadsheets. We defined a language to write the queries, which resembles SQL, the language to query databases. This allows to write queries which are more related to the spreadsheet content than with current approaches.

Refactoring meets Model-Driven Spreadsheet Evolution, Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Martins Pedro, Pereira Rui, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology, Quality in Model Driven Engineering Track, p.196–201, (2014) Abstractquatic14.pdf

Software refactoring is a well-known technique that provides transformations on software artifacts with the aim of improving their overall quality. In this paper we present a set of refactorings for ClassSheets, a modeling language that allows to specify the business logic of a spreadsheet in an object-oriented fashion. The set of refactorings that we propose allows us to improve the quality of these spreadsheet models. Moreover, it is implemented in a setting that guarantees that all model refactorings are automatically carried to all the corresponding (spreadsheet) instances, thus providing an automatic evolution of the data so it is always synchronized with the model.

Smelling Faults in Spreadsheets, Abreu, Rui, Cunha Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Martins Pedro, Perez Alexandre, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 30th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, Washington, DC, USA, p.111–120, (2014) Abstracticsme14.pdf

Despite being staggeringly error prone, spreadsheets are a highly flexible programming environment that is widely used in industry. In fact, spreadsheets are widely adopted for decision making, and decisions taken upon wrong (spreadsheet-based) assumptions may have serious economical impacts on businesses, among other consequences. This paper proposes a technique to automatically pinpoint potential faults in spreadsheets. It combines a catalog of spreadsheet smells that provide a first indication of a potential fault, with a generic spectrum-based fault localization strategy in order to improve (in terms of accuracy and false positive rate) on these initial results. Our technique has been implemented in a tool which helps users detecting faults. To validate the proposed technique, we consider a well-known and well-documented catalog of faulty spreadsheets. Our experiments yield two main results: we were able to distinguish between smells that can point to faulty cells from smells and those that are not capable of doing so; and we provide a technique capable of detecting a significant number of errors: two thirds of the cells labeled as faulty are in fact (documented) errors.

SmellSheet Detective: A Tool for Detecting Bad Smells in Spreadsheets, Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Mendes Jorge, Martins Pedro, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Washington, DC, USA, p.243–244, (2012) Abstractvlhcc12-td.pdf

This tool demo paper presents SmellSheet Detective: a tool for automatically detecting bad smells in spreadsheets. We have defined a catalog of bad smells in spreadsheet data which was fully implemented in a reusable library for the manipulation of spreadsheets. This library is the building block of the SmellSheet Detective tool, that has been used to detect smells in large, real-world spreadsheet within the EUSES corpus, in order to validate and evolve our bad smells catalog.

Spreadsheet Engineering, Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, and Saraiva João , Central European Functional Programming School - 5th Summer School, CEFP 2013, Revised Selected Papers, July, Springer, Heidelberg, (2014) Abstractdsl13_notes.pdf

These tutorial notes present a methodology for spreadsheet engineering. First, we present data mining and database techniques to reason about spreadsheet data. These techniques are used to compute relationships between spreadsheet elements (cells/columns/rows). These relations are then used to infer a model defining the business logic of the spreadsheet. Such a model of a spreadsheet data is a visual domain specific language that we embed in a well-known spreadsheet system. The embedded model is the building block to define techniques for model-driven spreadsheet development, where advanced techniques are used to guarantee the model-instance synchronization. In this model-driven environment, any user data update as to follow the the model-instance conformance relation, thus, guiding spreadsheet users to introduce correct data. Data refinement techniques are used to synchronize models and instances after users update/evolve the model. These notes briefly describe our model-driven spreadsheet environment, the MDSheet environment, that implements the presented methodology. To evaluate both proposed techniques and the MDSheet tool, we have conducted, in laboratory sessions, an empirical study with the summer school participants. The results of this study are presented in these notes.

SpreadsheetDoc: An Excel Add-in for Documenting Spreadsheets, Canteiro, Diogo, and Cunha Jácome , Proceedings of the 6th National Symposium of Informatics (INForum’15), Covilhã, Portugal, (2015) inforum2015.pdf
Static Energy Consumption Analysis in Variability Systems, Couto, Marco, Cunha Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Pereira Rui, and Saraiva João Alexandre , 2nd Green in Software Engineering Workshop (GInSEng’16), an event of the 4th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S), 29 Aug. - 1 Sep., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, (2016) Abstractginseng_2016_paper_1-2.pdf

Energy consumption is becoming an evident concern to software developers. This is even more notorious due to the propagation of mobile devices. Such propagation of devices is also influencing software development: a software system is now developed has a set of similar products sharing common features.
In this short paper, we describe our methodology aim at static and accurately predict the energy consumption of software products in such variability systems, typically called software product lines.

Systematic Spreadsheet Construction Processes, Mendes, Jorge, Cunha Jácome, Duarte Francisco, Engels Gregor, Saraiva João, and Sauer Stefan , IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 11-14 Oct., Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, (2017) paper.pdf
Towards a Catalog of Spreadsheet Smells, Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João P., Ribeiro Hugo, and Saraiva João , Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications - Volume Part IV, Berlin, Heidelberg, p.202–216, (2012) Abstracticcsa-sq12.pdf

Spreadsheets are considered to be the most widely used programming language in the world, and reports have shown that 90% of real-world spreadsheets contain errors. In this work, we try to identify spreadsheet smells, a concept adapted from software, which consists of a surface indication that usually corresponds to a deeper problem. Our smells have been integrated in a tool, and were computed for a large spreadsheet repository. Finally, the analysis of the results we obtained led to the refinement of our initial catalog.

Towards an Evaluation of Bidirectional Model-driven Spreadsheets, Cunha, Jácome, Fernandes João Paulo, Mendes Jorge, and Saraiva João , User evaluation for Software Engineering Researchers, p.25–28, (2012) Abstractuser12.pdf

Spreadsheets are widely recognized as popular programming systems with a huge number of spreadsheets being created every day. Also, spreadsheets are often used in the decision processes of profit-oriented companies. While this illustrates their practical importance, studies have shown that up to 90% of real-world spreadsheets contain errors. In order to improve the productivity of spreadsheet end-users, the software engineering community has proposed to employ model-driven approaches to spreadsheet development. In this paper we describe the evaluation of a bidirectional model-driven spreadsheet environment. In this environment, models and data instances are kept in conformity, even after an update on any of these artifacts. We describe the issues of an empirical study we plan to conduct, based on our previous experience with end-user studies. Our goal is to assess if this model-driven spreadsheet development framework does in fact contribute to improve the productivity of spreadsheet users.