Testing homogeneous spreadsheet grids with the 'what you see iswhat you test' methodology

摘要

Although there has been recent research into ways to designnenvironments that enable end users to create their own programs, littlenattention has been given to helping these end users systematically testntheir programs. To help address this need in spreadsheet systems (thenmost widely used type of end-user programming language), we previouslynintroduced a visual approach to systematically testing individual cellsnin spreadsheet systems. However, the previous approach did not scalenwell in the presence of largely homogeneous grids, which introducenproblems somewhat analogous to the array-testing problems of imperativenprograms. We present two approaches to spreadsheet testing thatnexplicitly support such grids. We present the algorithms, timencomplexities, and performance data comparing the two approaches. This isnpart of our continuing work to bring to end users at least some of thenbenefits of formalized notions of testing without requiring knowledge ofntesting beyond a naive level