Refactoring smelly spreadsheet models

Identifying bad design patterns in software is a successful and inspiring research trend. While these patterns do not necessarily correspond to software errors, the fact is that they raise potential problematic issues, often referred to as code smells, and that can for example compromise maintainability or evolution. The identification of code smells in spreadsheets, which can be viewed as software development environments for non-professional programmers, has already been the subject of confluent researches by different groups. While these research groups have focused on detecting smells on concrete spreadsheets, or spreadsheet instances, in this paper we propose a comprehensive set of smells for abstract representations of spreadsheets, or spreadsheet models. We also propose a set of refactorings suggesting how spreadsheet models can become simpler to understand, manipulate and evolve. Finally we present the integration of both smells and refactorings under the MDSheet framework.
Part funded by ERDF - European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within projects FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-022701 and Network Sensing for Critical Systems Monitoring (NORTE-01-0124-FEDER-000058), ref. BIM-2013 BestCase RL3.2 UMINHO.