Using Calculation Fragments for Spreadsheet Testing and Debugging
This addresses the challenge for spreadsheet developers who struggle with verifying correctness in complex real-world spreadsheets, offering an incremental improvement over existing automated techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of testing and debugging complex spreadsheets by proposing to automatically compute manageable spreadsheet fragments, enabling developers to verify correctness more easily on smaller sets of formulas.
A number of automated techniques and tools were proposed in the research literature over the years which aim to support the spreadsheet developer in the process of testing and debugging a faulty spreadsheet. One underlying assumption of many of these approaches is that the spreadsheet developer is capable of providing test cases or is at least reliably able to determine whether a calculated value in a certain cell is correct given the current set of inputs. Since real-world spreadsheets can be complex, we argue that these assumptions might be too strong in some situations. We therefore propose to support the user during testing and debugging by automatically computing spreadsheet fragments of manageable size. The spreadsheet developer can then verify the correctness of a smaller set of formulas for which the calculated output can be more easily validated.