Sharing reasoning about faults in spreadsheets: An empirical study

  • Authors:

  • Joseph Lawrance;Robin Abraham;Margaret Burnett;Martin Erwig

  • Affiliations:

  • Oregon State University;Oregon State University;Oregon State University;Oregon State University

  • Venue:
  • VLHCC '06 Proceedings of the Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Although researchers have developed several ways to reason about the location of faults in spreadsheets, no single form of reasoning is without limitations. Multiple types of errors can appear in spreadsheets, and various fault localization techniques differ in the kinds of errors that they are effective in locating. In this paper, we report empirical results from an emerging system that attempts to improve fault localization for end-user programmers by sharing the results of the reasoning systems found in WYSIWYT and UCheck. By evaluating the visual feedback from each fault localization system, we shed light on where these different forms of reasoning and combinations of them complement - and contradict - one another, and which heuristics can be used to generate the best advice from a combination of these systems.