On the Usage of Dependency-based Models for Spreadsheet Debugging
Birgit Hofer, Franz Wotawa · 2014
Locating faults in spreadsheets can be difficult. Therefore, tools supporting the localization of faults are needed. Model-based software debugging (MBSD) is a promising fault local-ization technique. This paper presents a novel dependency-based model that can be used in MBSD. This model allows improvements of the diagnostic accuracy while keeping the computation times short. In an empirical evaluation, we show that dependency-based models of spreadsheets whose value-based models are often not solvable in an acceptable amount of time can be solved in less than one second. Fur-thermore, we show that the amount of diagnoses obtained through dependency-based models is reduced by 15 % on average when using the novel model instead of the origi-nal dependency-based model. The short computation time and the improved diagnostic accuracy enable the usage of model-based debugging for spreadsheets in practice.