BUS209 Organizational Behavior

Current Spreadsheet Applications, such as Excel and Google Sheets, provide innumerous built-in facilities, including arithmetic, financial and statistical operations, as well as conditional expressions. Thus, users with little or no formal training in programming can use Spreadsheet Applications to implement their own Spreadsheet Programs.

 

In fact, Spreadsheet Applications have become one of the most popular end-user programming environments nowadays. However, these applications also ease the introduction of errors in Spreadsheet Programs. Minor mistakes in formulas can mislead decisionmaking processes, resulting in uncountable costs to organizations.

 

In general, end-user programmers are unaware of the potential risks that the uncontrolled construction of Spreadsheet Programs can cause. Therefore, a major focus of this paper is to offer an automated approach that makes programmers aware of introduced faults, so that they can build high quality Spreadsheet Programs. 

 

In particular, we propose SS-BDD, a framework for building and running Spreadsheets test scenarios, which relies on the use of
Behavior Driven Development (BDD). We used SS-BDD to test three different Spreadsheet Programs. Our experience shows that SS-BDD can be used to build end-user friendly test scenarios which can achieve high fault-detection effectiveness. 

In this study we proposed an approach for testing the spreadsheets. The chosen spreadsheets are user- friendly and do not require any kind of special training. A tool is used to execute the test that is automatic and with easy implementation. We used Spreadsheets tests that relied on the use of Behaviour Driven Development (SS-BDD) to test three spreadsheets which are taken from different sources. We injected some faults knowingly in the spreadsheets to test the accuracy.

The test is being done to know the scenarios to which the spreadsheets are exposed to and the values that are expected from these conditions. The spreadsheets on which these tests are implemented are named as Spreadsheets Under Test. The test was done to know that the output values are actually corresponding to the expected ones in line with the input values. The execution is done and a report is framed to know the results of the executed test that is passed or failed.

The test has being processed with three different scenarios. First one is error- guessing test case design technique, in the second we did implemented manually some test script and at last we finally executed all the test scripts which we implemented. As a result 38 faults were detected during the execution process of these Scripts. Even the incorrectly applied formulas were also detected by the test scenario. We found that instead of implementing these test we should allow the end user programmers to directly access the spreadsheets from the specified scenarios.

Spreadsheet applications are analysed by incremental graphical feedback that is interwoven with the construction process (e.g., Excel and Google Sheets). We constructed a set of guidelines for running tests with the help of SS-BBD. SS- BBD test scenarios are actually based on the concept of Behaviour Driven Development to target end- user programmers to test the effectiveness of the cases. In these test SS-BBD was used as the genetic testing framework for excel spreadsheets.

References:

Burnett, M., Cook, C & Rothermel, G (2004). ‘End User Software Engineering’, Communications of the ACM, vol. 47, no.9.

Myers, G.J (2004). The Art of Software Testing, Wiley.