The slides for our ICSE 2012 paper on "Detecting and Visualizing Inter-worksheet Smells in Spreadsheets"

1. Detecting and Visualizing
Inter-worksheet Smells in Spreadsheets
Felienne Hermans (@felienne)

2. Code smells

3. How did we get this idea?

4. By studying what business does in
practice

5. Excel is running companies!

6. 50% of spreadsheets form the basis for
decisions

7. Spreadsheet users lack great tool
support

10. We did not start coding!

11. We performed 27 interviews

12. We asked them:
What annoys you?

13. And what makes you happy?

14. We found that especially support for
understanding spreadsheets was missing

15. Then we started coding

16. Published at ICSE 2011

20. Users started diagnosing with the dfd’s

21. This led us to the idea of smells

22. We took Fowler’s smells and adapted
them to be applicable on spreadsheets

23. Inappropriate Intimacy

24. Inappropriate Intimacy

25. Inappropriate Intimacy
= number of couples between A and B

26. Feature Envy

27. Feature Envy

28. Feature Envy (calculated on a cell)
=number of external connections

29. Middle man

30. Middle man

31. Middle man

32. Middle man
= number of MMFs on a worksheet

33. Shotgun surgery

34. Shotgun surgery

35. Shotgun surgery
=number of changing sheets and formulas

36. Then we set thresholds for the metrics
Using the EUSES corpus as a bench mark

37. And
implemented
it into our
visualization
toolkit Breviz

39. We validated our implementation with a
case study

42. “Are those worksheets really that
connected?”

43. “Are you sure that arrow is correct?”

44. “this formula annoys me, I have to go
back to the other sheet so many times to
look up the references, it makes me dizzy”

45. Interesting fact about Middle Man:
Our definition was ‘wrong’

46. We had not anticipated Middle Men
within worksheets

47. The most extreme case was a worksheet
on which 220 formulas depended, spread
over 10 worksheets

49. The owner immediately recognized the
risk

50. Conclusion: principles from software
engineering transfer well to spreadsheets

58. Detecting and Visualizing
Inter-worksheet Smells in Spreadsheets
Felienne Hermans (@felienne)