Automatically Extracting Class Diagrams from Spreadsheets

Abstract. The use of spreadsheets to capture information is widespread in industry. Spreadsheets can thus be a wealthy source of domain information. We propose to automatically extract this information and transform it into class diagrams. The resulting class diagram can be used by software engineers to understand, refine, or re-implement the spreadsheet’s functionality. To enable the transformation into class diagrams we create a library of common spreadsheet usage patterns. We localize these patterns in the spreadsheet using a two- dimensional parsing algorithm. The resulting parse tree is transformed and enriched with information from the library. We evaluate our approach on the spreadsheets from the Euses Spreadsheet corpus by comparing a subset of the generated class diagrams with reference class diagrams created manually.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ECOOP
• Authors: Felienne Hermans, Martin Pinzger, Arie van Deursen
• Keywords: Class Diagrams, ECOOP 2010, Programming Languages, Spreadsheet, Spreadsheet Usage Patterns