%0 Conference Paper
%B Proceedings of the 30th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution
%D 2014
%T Smelling faults in spreadsheets
%A Rui Abreu
%A Jácome Cunha
%A João Paulo Fernandes
%A Pedro Martins
%A Perez, Alexandre
%A João Alexandre Saraiva
%C Vitoria, Canada
%V 14
%X <p>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 wellknown 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.</p>
%8 September
%> https://haslab.uminho.pt/sites/default/files/ruimaranhao/files/icsme14.pdf