Finding bugs in spreadsheets using reference counting
Nima Joharizadeh · 2015
Spreadsheets are considered one of the most widely used end-user programming environments. Just as it is important for software to be free of bugs, spreadsheets need to be free of errors. This is important because in some cases, errors in spreadsheets can cost a financial entity thousands of dollars. In this work, we formulate a class of commonplace errors based on our manual inspection of real life spreadsheets, and further provide an analysis algorithm to detect these errors. We introduce ``reference counting'' as a simple yet effective algorithm to detect range errors. We finally demonstrate how reference counting can effectively point out erroneous cells in faulty spreadsheets.