• Corpus ID: 19391756

Breviz: Visualizing Spreadsheets using Dataflow Diagrams

@article{Hermans2011BrevizVS,
  title={Breviz: Visualizing Spreadsheets using Dataflow Diagrams},
  author={Felienne F. J. Hermans and Martin Pinzger and Arie van Deursen},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2011},
  volume={abs/1111.6895}
}
Spreadsheets are used extensively in industry, often for business critical purposes. In previous work we have analyzed the information needs of spreadsheet professionals and addressed their need for support with the transition of a spreadsheet to a colleague with the generation of data flow diagrams. In this paper we describe the application of these data flow diagrams for the purpose of understanding a spreadsheet with three example cases. We furthermore suggest an additional application of… 
View PDF on arXiv
17 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
1
Background Citations
6
Methods Citations
8
Results Citations
1

Figures from this paper

17 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

Perquimans: A Tool for Visualizing Patterns of Spreadsheet Function Combinations
TLDR
Perquimans is a tool that analyzes spreadsheet collections to visualize patterns of function combination as an interactive tree, representing both the most common and most anomalous patterns of formula construction and their contexts.
An Empirical Study of MCL-based Spreadsheet Visualization
TLDR
Among the features of the tool, highlighting of clusters was found to be useful for spreadsheet debugging while data dependency graph based visualization did not improve effectiveness and efficiency of debugging a spreadsheet.
Fritz: A Tool for Spreadsheet Quality Assurance
TLDR
Fritz enriches the traditional spreadsheet visualization scheme by including visual feedback about certain structural and quality aspects, which allows for easier cognition of a spreadsheet's layout, and helps users to detect and comprehend irregularities within it.
Explaining spreadsheets with spreadsheets (short paper)
TLDR
The notion of explanation soundness is identified and it is shown that explanation sheets which conform to simple rules of formula coverage provide sound explanations.
A Literature Review of Spreadsheet Technology
TLDR
This literature review presents an overview of research on spreadsheet technology, its challenges and its solutions, and attempts to identify why software developers generally frown upon spreadsheets and how spreadsheet research can help alter this view.
Avoiding, finding and fixing spreadsheet errors - A survey of automated approaches for spreadsheet QA
Visualizing Cognitive Units in Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets can be large and complex and their maintenance and comprehension difficult to end-users. Large numbers of cells, complex formulae and missing documentation can impede the understanding…
XVIZIT: Visualizing cognitive units in spreadsheets
  • K. Hodnigg, M. Pinzger
  • Computer Science
    2015 IEEE 3rd Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)
  • 2015
Spreadsheets can be large and complex and their maintenance and comprehension difficult to end-users. Large numbers of cells, complex formulae and missing documentation can impede the understanding…
On the empirical evaluation of similarity coefficients for spreadsheets fault localization
TLDR
This paper studies the impact of different similarity coefficients on the accuracy of spectrum-based fault localization applied to the spreadsheet domain and shows that three of the 42 studied coefficients require less effort by the user while inspecting the diagnostic report, and can be used interchangeably without a loss of accuracy.
Abstracting spreadsheet data flow through hypergraph redrawing
TLDR
A method of raising the level of abstraction of spreadsheets by "redrawing the boundary" of the cell is proposed and illustrated via common sub-expression identification and the application of sub-tree isomorphisms for the detection of vector (array) operations.
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-8 OF 8 REFERENCES
Supporting professional spreadsheet users by generating leveled dataflow diagrams
TLDR
This paper first study the problems and information needs of professional spreadsheet users by means of a survey conducted at a large financial company, and presents an approach that extracts this information from spreadsheets and presents it in a compact and easy to understand way, with leveled dataflow diagrams.
Automatically Extracting Class Diagrams from Spreadsheets
TLDR
This work creates a library of common spreadsheet usage patterns that are localized in the spreadsheet using a two- dimensional parsing algorithm and transformed and enriched with information from the library to automatically extract information and transform it into class diagrams.
Spreadsheet Risk Management in Organisations
TLDR
Findings support previous findings of Panko (1998), that errors occur frequently in spreadsheets and that there is little or unenforced controls employed, however this research finds that attitudes are changing with regard to spreadsheet risk.
Structured Systems Analysis: Tools and Techniques
This valuable volume provides a practical technique for building a logical (non-physical) model of a commercial data processing system. It is extensively illustrated to provide graphic explanations…
Estimating the numbers of end users and end user programmers
TLDR
With improvements to Boehm's method, it is estimated that in 2012 there will be 90 million end users in American workplaces, while over 13 million will describe themselves as programmers, compared to BLS projections of fewer than 3 million professional programmers.
Spreadsheet Risk Management in Organisations,Proceedings of EuSpRIG 2010 Conference
  • Spreadsheet Risk Management in Organisations,Proceedings of EuSpRIG 2010 Conference
  • 2010
Spreadsheet Risk Management in Organisations,Proceedings of EuSpRIG
  • 2010
A Risk and Control-Oriented Study of the Practices of Spreadsheet Developers
  • Proceeding of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
  • 1996