Spreadsheets are commonly used in organizations as a programming tool for
business-related calculations and decision making. Since faults in spreadsheets
can have severe business impacts, a number of approaches from general software
engineering have been applied to spreadsheets in recent years, among them the
concept of code smells. Smells can in particular be used for the task of fault
prediction. An analysis of existing spreadsheet smells, however, revealed that
the predictive power of individual smells can be limited. In this work we
therefore propose a machine learning based approach which combines the
predictions of individual smells by using an AdaBoost ensemble classifier.
Experiments on two public datasets containing real-world spreadsheet faults
show significant improvements in terms of fault prediction accuracy.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, to be published in 40th International Conference
on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results Trac