Spreadsheet debugging behaviour of expert and novice end-users
Brian C. Bishop, Kevin McDaid · 2008
In recent years the reliability of end-user developed spreadsheet programs has been shown to be very poor. Surprisingly, relatively little research has been carried out in the areas of spreadsheet testing and debugging. With the aim of recording and analysing end-user behaviour and performance in spreadsheet error detection and correction, an experiment was conducted with 13 industry-based professionals and 34 accounting & finance students. The work utilised a novel approach for acquiring experimental data through the unobtrusive recording of participants debugging actions using a custom built VBA tool. Based on the findings from analysis of debugging behaviour, a simple debugging tool was developed by the authors, and its effects on debugging performance were investigated by means of a controlled experiment.