Applying Code Inspection to Spreadsheet Testing
研究让60名本科生对含8个错误的电子表格进行个人和小组代码审查，发现个人审查仅发现63%错误，小组审查提升至83%，但小组阶段未发现新错误，只是汇总个人发现，引发对小组审查必要性的质疑。
Abstract:In programming, reliability requires an extensive testing phase. Spreadsheet development, which has about the error rate as program development, also needs to be followed by an extensive testing phase if spreadsheets are to be reliable. In this study, sixty undergraduate MIS students code-inspected a spreadsheet seeded with eight errors. They first inspected the spreadsheet working alone. They then met in twenty groups of three to reinspect the spreadsheet together. Effort was made to prevent hasty inspection.Individual code inspection, consistent with past studies of both spreadsheet and program code inspection, caught only 63 percent of the errors. Group inspection raised this to 83 percent. However, the group phase never found new errors; it merely pooled the errors found during the individual phase by the three members. One group even "lost" an error found during the individual phase. This raises the question of whether a group code inspection phase is really necessary. Other findings were that subjects were overconfident when inspecting alone, that certain types of errors are especially difficult to detect, and that the benefits of the group phase is greatest for these difficult-to-detect types of errors.Key Words and Phrases: code inspectionerror detectionspreadsheet errorsspreadsheet testing Additional informationNotes on contributorsRaymond R. PankoRaymond R.Panko is Professor of Decision Sciences at the University of Hawaii. He has been conducting research on end user computing since the early 1970s, initially as a graduate student at Stanford University and later as a project manager at SRJ International. His current focus is on the risks involved in computing, especially in spreadsheeting. He has created a website for research on spreadsheeting. Its URL is http://panko.cba.hawaii.edu/ssr/.