Spreadsheets are the most popular end-user programming software, where formulae act like programs and also have smells. One well recognized smell is the use of nested-IF expressions, which have low readability and high cognitive cost for users, and are error-prone during reuse or maintenance. End users usually lack essential programming language knowledge and skills to tackle or even realize this problem, yet no automatic approaches are currently available.<\/p>\n
This paper proposes the rst exploration of the nest-if usage status against two large-scale spreadsheet corpora containing over 80,000 industry-level spreadsheets. It turns out the use of nested-IF expressions are surprisingly common among end users. We then present an approach to tackling this problem through automatic formula refactoring. The general idea of the automatic approach is two-fold. First, we detect and remove logic redundancy based on the AST of a formula. Second, we identify higher-level semantics that have been represented with fragmented and scattered syntax, and reassemble the syntax using concise built-in functions. A comprehensive evaluation with over 28 million nested-IF formulae reveals that the approach is able to relieve the smell of over 90% of nested-IF formulae.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spreadsheets are the most popular end-user programming software, where formulae act like programs and also have smells. One well recognized smell is the use of nested-IF expressions, which have low readability and high cognitive cost for users, and are error-prone during reuse or maintenance. End users usually lack essential programming language knowledge and skills to 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