Authors
Daniel Kulesz & Stefan Wagne
Abstract
Spreadsheets (sometimes also called Excel programs) are powerful tools which play a business-critical role in many organizations. However, due to faulty spreadsheets many bad decisions have been taken in recent years. Since then, a number of researchers have been studying spreadsheet errors. However, one issue that hinders discussion among researchers and professionals is the lack of a commonly accepted taxonomy.
Albeit a number of taxonomies for spreadsheet errors have been proposed in previous work, a major issue is that they use the term error that itself is already ambiguous. Furthermore, to apply most existing taxonomies, detailed knowledge about the underlying process and knowledge about the "brain state" of the acting spreadsheet users is required. Due to these limitations, known error-like phenomena in freely available spreadsheet corpora cannot be classified with these taxonomies.
We propose Asheetoxy, a simple and phenomenon-oriented taxonomy that avoids the problematic term error altogether. An initial study with 7 participants indicates that even non-spreadsheet researchers similarly classify real-world spreadsheet phenomena using Asheetoxy.
Sample
This figure shows an overview of Asheetoxy with all of its terms and relations.
The arrows between the terms state a can cause relationship (e.g. a wrong action can cause a defect, a defect can cause a failure, etc.).
Asheetoxy is not a cherry-pick-remix of existing taxonomies but rather a recomposition with added elements and distinctions that are directly targeted at the particularities of spreadsheets.
Publication
2018, 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering Methods in Spreadsheets, October
Full article
Asheetoxy: A taxonomy for classifying negative spreadsheet-related phenomena
