An Empirical Study of End-User Behaviour in Spreadsheet Debugging

Very little is known about the process by which end-user developers audit and debug spreadsheets. Any research pertaining to the development of spreadsheet debugging methodologies or automated spreadsheet auditing tools would benefit from information on how people actually perform the debugging process in practice. This paper describes the current ongoing experiment designed to record and analyses the behaviour of industry professionals in the debugging of spreadsheets. The results of this experiment will enhance the understanding of software debugging in general, and the spreadsheet debugging process in particular.