Faults in spreadsheets can represent a major risk for businesses. To minimize such risks, various automated testing and debugging approaches for spreadsheets were proposed. In such approaches, often one main assumption is that the spreadsheet developer is able to indicate if the outcomes of certain calculations correspond to the intended values. This, however, might require that the user performs calculations manually, a process which can easily become tedious and error-prone for more complex spreadsheets. In this work, we propose an interactive spreadsheet algorithmic debugging method, which is based on partitioning the spreadsheet into fragments. Test cases can then be automatically or manually created for each of these smaller fragments, whose correctness or faultiness can be easier assessed by users than test cases that cover the entire spreadsheet. The annotated test cases are then fed into an algorithmic debugging technique, which returns a set of formulas that could have caused any observed failures, i.e., discrepancies between the expected and computed calculation outcomes. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the suggested decomposition approach can speed up the algorithmic debugging process and significantly reduce the number of fault candidates returned by the algorithm. An additional laboratory study shows that fragmenting a spreadsheet with our method furthermore reduces the time needed by users for creating test cases for a spreadsheet.

中文翻译：

---

基于片段的电子表格调试

电子表格中的错误可能会给企业带来重大风险。为了尽量减少这种风险，人们提出了各种电子表格的自动化测试和调试方法。在此类方法中，通常一个主要假设是电子表格开发人员能够指示某些计算的结果是否符合预期值。然而，这可能需要用户手动执行计算，对于更复杂的电子表格，这个过程很容易变得乏味和容易出错。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种交互式电子表格算法调试方法，该方法基于将电子表格划分为片段。然后可以为每个较小的片段自动或手动创建测试用例，与覆盖整个电子表格的测试用例相比，用户更容易评估其正确性或错误性。然后将带注释的测试用例输入算法调试技术，该技术返回一组公式，这些公式可能导致任何观察到的失败，即预期和计算结果之间的差异。仿真实验表明，所建议的分解方法可以加快算法调试过程并显着减少算法返回的故障候选数量。另一项实验室研究表明，使用我们的方法对电子表格进行分段还可以减少用户为电子表格创建测试用例所需的时间。它返回一组可能导致任何观察到的失败的公式，即预期和计算计算结果之间的差异。仿真实验表明，所建议的分解方法可以加快算法调试过程并显着减少算法返回的故障候选数量。另一项实验室研究表明，使用我们的方法对电子表格进行分段还可以减少用户为电子表格创建测试用例所需的时间。它返回一组可能导致任何观察到的失败的公式，即预期和计算结果之间的差异。仿真实验表明，所建议的分解方法可以加快算法调试过程并显着减少算法返回的故障候选数量。另一项实验室研究表明，使用我们的方法对电子表格进行分段还可以减少用户为电子表格创建测试用例所需的时间。