Understanding Spreadsheet Evolution in Practice

摘要

As a special kind of software, spreadsheets have been evolving during their life cycle. Understanding spreadsheet evolution can help facilitate spreadsheet design, maintenance and fault detection. However, understanding spreadsheet evolution is challenging in practice. There are many factors that hinder spreadsheet evolution comprehension, such as, lack of version information, complicated structure changes during evolution, etc. Thus, we propose this work to facilitate the understanding of spreadsheet evolution, including developing semi-automated technique to build versioned spreadsheet corpora, characterizing and understanding how spreadsheet templates are reused, developing automated tools for spreadsheet comparison, and new approaches for fault detection during evolution.