A Comparative Study of Automated Testing Tools for Spreadsheets

Abstract

Organizations and industries use spreadsheet programs, such as MS Excel, for various tasks, such as accounting, financial calculations, and reporting. However, the number of spreadsheets that contain errors is very high. One primary reason is that different end-users develop spreadsheets without programming or software development training. Thus, researchers have proposed a variety of automated tools and techniques to support the end-users in finding and fixing errors in spreadsheets. The main objective of this paper is to study different automated tools in spreadsheet testing and classify them according to two criteria: how they work and the ability to find spreadsheet faults. For this purpose, we discuss various spreadsheet testing automated tools, techniques, and strategies. In addition, we highlight their performance and where they can be used so that they can be beneficial to both end-users and researchers. We then set out key directions for potential future works.