Perquimans: A Tool for Visualizing Patterns of Spreadsheet Function Combinations

Spreadsheet environments offer many functions to manipulate data, which users can combine into complex formulae. However, for both researchers and practitioners who want to study formulae to improve spreadsheet practices, anticipating these combinations is difficult. Therefore, we developed Perquimans, a tool that analyzes spreadsheet collections to visualize patterns of function combination as an interactive tree, representing both the most common and most anomalous patterns of formula construction and their contexts. Using spreadsheets from the Enron corpus, we conduct a case study and a user study to explore Perquimans' various applications, such as those in flexible smell detection and spreadsheet education.

[1]  Felienne Hermans,et al.  A grammar for spreadsheet formulas evaluated on two large datasets , 2015, 2015 IEEE 15th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM).

[2]  Felienne Hermans,et al.  Detecting problematic lookup functions in spreadsheets , 2015, 2015 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC).

[3]  Jácome Cunha,et al.  Smelling Faults in Spreadsheets , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution.

[4]  Mik Kersten,et al.  How are Java software developers using the Elipse IDE? , 2006, IEEE Software.

[5]  Raymond R. Panko,et al.  Sarbanes-Oxley: What About all the Spreadsheets? , 2008, ArXiv.

[6]  Arie van Deursen,et al.  Supporting professional spreadsheet users by generating leveled dataflow diagrams , 2010, 2011 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[7]  Arie van Deursen,et al.  Detecting code smells in spreadsheet formulas , 2011, 2012 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM).

[8]  Mauricio A. Saca.  Refactoring improving the design of existing code , 2017, 2017 IEEE 37th Central America and Panama Convention (CONCAPAN XXXVII).

[9]  Bonnie A. Nardi,et al.  The spreadsheet interface: A basis for end user programming , 1990, IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.

[10]  Atipol Asavametha.  Detecting bad smells in spreadsheets , 2012 .

[11]  Arie van Deursen,et al.  Detecting and visualizing inter-worksheet smells in spreadsheets , 2012, 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[12]  Gregg Rothermel,et al.  The EUSES spreadsheet corpus: a shared resource for supporting experimentation with spreadsheet dependability mechanisms , 2005, ACM SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes.

[13]  Martin P. Robillard,et al.  A field study of API learning obstacles , 2011, Empirical Software Engineering.

[14]  Emerson R. Murphy-Hill,et al.  Fuse: A Reproducible, Extendable, Internet-Scale Corpus of Spreadsheets , 2015, 2015 IEEE/ACM 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories.

[15]  Bas Jansen.  Enron versus EUSES: A Comparison of Two Spreadsheet Corpora , 2015, SEMS@ICSE.

[16]  Emerson R. Murphy-Hill,et al.  Enron's Spreadsheets and Related Emails: A Dataset and Analysis , 2015, 2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering.

[17]  Hugo Ribeiro,et al.  Towards a Catalog of Spreadsheet Smells , 2012, ICCSA.

[18]  Felienne Hermans,et al.  Code smells in spreadsheet formulas revisited on an industrial dataset , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME).

[19]  Danny Dig,et al.  Refactoring meets spreadsheet formulas , 2012, 2012 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM).

[20]  Mary Shaw,et al.  The state of the art in end-user software engineering , 2011, ACM Comput. Surv..

[21]  Arie van Deursen,et al.  Breviz: Visualizing Spreadsheets using Dataflow Diagrams , 2011, ArXiv.

[22]  Stephen G. Powell,et al.  Impact of errors in operational spreadsheets , 2009, Decis. Support Syst..

[23]  Mary Shaw,et al.  Estimating the numbers of end users and end user programmers , 2005, 2005 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC'05).

[24]  Markus Clermont,et al.  A Scalable Approach to Spreadsheet Visualization , 2003 .

[25]  Sabine Hipfl.  Using Layout Information for Spreadsheet Visualization , 2008, ArXiv.

[26]  政子 鶴岡,et al.  1998 IEEE International Conference on SMCに参加して , 1998 .

[27]  Bay-Wei Chang,et al.  Fluid visualization of spreadsheet structures , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages (Cat. No.98TB100254).