Design and evaluation of a literate spreadsheet

Abstract

Support for capturing and sharing the problem-solving knowledge associated with end-user-developed software is often lacking. The principles behind literate programming have been proposed as an approach to addressing this. To study the potential efficacy of these principles in the general end-user programming case, they were applied to spreadsheets, the most common end-user programming environment, to produce a literate spreadsheet design. The resulting artifact was then evaluated through a user study with a focus on the literate design's effect on user comprehension and modification performance in each of the data, formula and dependency layers of the spreadsheet model. Significant performance improvements were observed in the formula and dependency layers over the traditional spreadsheet design, suggesting that the literate form can help improve end-user problem-solving knowledge reuse.