Spreadsheet Guardian: An Approach to Protecting Semantic Correctness throughout the Evolution of Spreadsheets

摘要

Spreadsheets are powerful tools which play a business-critical role in manyorganizations. However, many bad decisions taken due to faulty spreadsheetsshow that these tools need serious quality assurance. Furthermore, whilecollaboration on spreadsheets for maintenance tasks is common, there has beenalmost no support for ensuring that the spreadsheets remain correct during thisprocess. We have developed an approach named Spreadsheet Guardian which separates thespecification of spreadsheet test rules from their execution. By automaticallyexecuting user-defined test rules, our approach is able to detect semanticfaults. It also protects all collaborating spreadsheet users from introducingfaults during maintenance, even if only few end-users specify test rules. Toevaluate Spreadsheet Guardian, we implemented a representative testingtechnique as an add-in for Microsoft Excel. We evaluated the testing technique in two empirical evaluations with 29end-users and 42 computer science students. The results indicate that thetechnique is easy to learn and to apply. Furthermore, after finishingmaintenance, participants with spreadsheets "protected" by the technique aremore realistic about the correctness of their spreadsheets than participantswho employ only "classic", non-interactive test rules based on static analysistechniques. Hence, we believe Spreadsheet Guardian can be of use forbusiness-critical spreadsheets.