Enron versus EUSES: A Comparison of Two Spreadsheet Corpora

Spreadsheets are widely used within companies and often form the basis for business decisions. Numerous cases are known where incorrect information in spreadsheets has lead to incorrect decisions. Such cases underline the relevance of research on the professional use of spreadsheets. Recently a new dataset became available for research, containing over 15.000 business spreadsheets that were extracted from the Enron E-mail Archive. With this dataset, we 1) aim to obtain a thorough understanding of the characteristics of spreadsheets used within companies, and 2) compare the characteristics of the Enron spreadsheets with the EUSES corpus which is the existing state of the art set of spreadsheets that is frequently used in spreadsheet studies. Our analysis shows that 1) the majority of spreadsheets are not large in terms of worksheets and formulas, do not have a high degree of coupling, and their formulas are relatively simple; 2) the spreadsheets from the EUSES corpus are, with respect to the measured characteristics, quite similar to the Enron spreadsheets.Comment: In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Software Engineering Methods in Spreadsheet

Applying an Error Taxonomy to Examine Inexperienced Spreadsheet Users’ Planning and Execution Errors

This paper presents preliminary findings of an application of the Panko-Aurigemma (2010) error taxonomy to errors generated in a spreadsheet training task. Data from 11 inexperienced trainees were obtained on two spreadsheet training tasks of different complexity and scored by two judges. High levels of inter-rater reliability were obtained for a refined planning and execution error classification. Preliminary findings relating to the likely processes underlying task completion indicate that trainees make more execution than planning errors on easy tasks. Negative associations were found between the frequency of execution and planning errors and task performance when completing easy tasks. For hard tasks, we found a negative association between task performance and frequency of execution errors; however, the association between the number of planning errors and performance was positive. These findings point to the utility of examining error types in IS training strategy research