@conference {conf/icsme/CunhaFMPS14, title = {Smelling Faults in Spreadsheets}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 30th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution}, series = {ICSME {\textquoteright}14}, year = {2014}, note = {

n/a

}, pages = {111{\textendash}120}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society}, organization = {IEEE Computer Society}, address = {Washington, DC, USA}, abstract = {

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.

}, keywords = {Faults, Smells, Spreadsheets}, url = {\url{http://conferences.computer.org/icsme/2014/papers/6146a111.pdf}}, attachments = {https://docentes.fct.unl.pt/sites/default/files/jmc-cunha/files/icsme14.pdf}, author = {Abreu, Rui and Cunha, J{\'a}come and Fernandes, Jo{\~a}o Paulo and Martins, Pedro and Perez, Alexandre and Saraiva, Jo{\~a}o} }