Practical Challenges with Spreadsheet Auditing Tools

TL;DR

This paper evaluates current spreadsheet auditing tools, highlighting their usefulness in fault detection and identifying key areas for improvement based on a study of 14 tools.

Contribution

It provides an empirical assessment of existing tools, revealing strengths and weaknesses, and suggests adopting static analysis techniques from traditional software engineering.

Findings

Most tools aid in fault detection but have significant issues.

Several problems could be addressed by adopting static analysis ideas from software engineering.

Study offers concrete recommendations for industry improvement.

Abstract

Just like other software, spreadsheets can contain significant faults. Static analysis is an accepted and well-established technique in software engineering known for its capability to discover faults. In recent years, a growing number of tool vendors started offering tools that allow casual end-users to run various static analyses on spreadsheets as well. We supervised a study where three undergraduate software engineering students examined a selection of 14 spreadsheet auditing tools, trying to give a concrete recommendation for an industry partner. Reflecting on the study's results, we found that most of these tools do provide useful aids in finding problems in spreadsheets, but we have also spotted several areas where tools had significant issues. Some of these issues could be remedied if spreadsheet auditing tool vendors would pick up some ideas of static analysis tools for traditional software development and adopt some of their solution approaches.