TY - GEN
T1 - Detecting code smells in spreadsheet formulas
AU - Hermans, Felienne
AU - Pinzger, Martin
AU - Van Deursen, Arie
PY - 2012/12/1
Y1 - 2012/12/1
N2 - Spreadsheets are used extensively in business processes around the world and just like software, spreadsheets are changed throughout their lifetime causing maintainability issues. This paper adapts known code smells to spreadsheet formulas. To that end we present a list of metrics by which we can detect smelly formulas and a visualization technique to highlight these formulas in spreadsheets. We implemented the metrics and visualization technique in a prototype tool to evaluate our approach in two ways. Firstly, we analyze the EUSES spreadsheet corpus, to study the occurrence of the formula smells. Secondly, we analyze ten real life spreadsheets, and interview the spreadsheet owners about the identified smells. The results of these evaluations indicate that formula smells are common and that they can reveal real errors and weaknesses in spreadsheet formulas.
AB - Spreadsheets are used extensively in business processes around the world and just like software, spreadsheets are changed throughout their lifetime causing maintainability issues. This paper adapts known code smells to spreadsheet formulas. To that end we present a list of metrics by which we can detect smelly formulas and a visualization technique to highlight these formulas in spreadsheets. We implemented the metrics and visualization technique in a prototype tool to evaluate our approach in two ways. Firstly, we analyze the EUSES spreadsheet corpus, to study the occurrence of the formula smells. Secondly, we analyze ten real life spreadsheets, and interview the spreadsheet owners about the identified smells. The results of these evaluations indicate that formula smells are common and that they can reveal real errors and weaknesses in spreadsheet formulas.
KW - code smells
KW - refactoring
KW - spreadsheets
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84873152381&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84873152381&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405300
DO - 10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405300
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84873152381
SN - 9781467323123
T3 - IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, ICSM
SP - 409
EP - 418
BT - Proceedings of the 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, ICSM 2012
T2 - 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, ICSM 2012
Y2 - 23 September 2012 through 28 September 2012
ER -