Model-based diagnosis of spreadsheet programs: a constraint-based debugging approach

Abstract Spreadsheet programs are probably the most successful example of enduser software development tools and are used for a variety of purposes. Like any type of software, they are prone to error, in particular as they are usually developed by non-programmers. While various techniques exist to support the developer in finding errors in procedural programs, the tool support for spreadsheet debugging is still limited. In this paper, we show how techniques from model-based diagnosis can be applied and extended for spreadsheet debugging by translating the relevant parts of a spreadsheet to a constraint satisfaction problem. We additionally propose both problem-specific and generalizable extensions to the classical diagnosis algorithms which help to detect potential problems in a spreadsheet based on user-provided test cases more efficiently. The proposed techniques were integrated into a modular framework for spreadsheet debugging and evaluated with respect to scalability based on a ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: ASE
• Authors: Dietmar Jannach, Thomas Schmitz
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, ASE 2016