%0 Conference Paper
%B Proceedings of the Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing - VL/HCC
%D 2010
%T Automatically Inferring ClassSheet Models from Spreadsheets
%A Jácome Cunha
%A Martin Erwig
%A João Alexandre Saraiva
%C Madrid, Spain
%I IEEE Computer Society
%K ClassSheets inference
%K Spreadsheets
%P 93–100
%R http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2010.22
%S VLHCC '10
%U http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2010.22
%X <p>Many errors in spreadsheet formulas can be avoided if spreadsheets are built automatically from higher-level models that can encode and enforce consistency constraints.<br /> However, designing such models is time consuming and requires expertise beyond the knowledge to work with spreadsheets. Legacy spreadsheets pose a particular challenge to the approach of controlling spreadsheet evolution through higher-level models, because the need for a model might be overshadowed by two problems: (A) The benefit of creating a spreadsheet is lacking since the legacy spreadsheet already exists, and (B) existing data must be transferred into the new model-generated spreadsheet.To address these problems and to support the modeldriven spreadsheet engineering approach, we have developed a tool that can automatically infer ClassSheet models from spreadsheets. To this end, we have adapted a method to infer entity/relationship models from relational database to the spreadsheets/ClassSheets realm. We have implemented our techniques in the HAEXCEL framework and integrated it with the ViTSL/Gencel spreadsheet generator, which allows the automatic generation of refactored spreadsheets from the inferred ClassSheet model. The resulting spreadsheet guides further changes and provably safeguards the spreadsheet against a large class of formula errors. The developed tool is a significant contribution to spreadsheet (reverse) engineering, because it fills an important gap and allows a promising design method (ClassSheets) to be applied to a huge collection of legacy spreadsheets with minimal effort.</p>
%8 September
%@ 978-0-7695-4206-5
%> https://haslab.uminho.pt/sites/default/files/jacome/files/vl-hcc10.pdf