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Publications

Publications by Jácome Costa Cunha

2014

Refactoring meets Model-Driven Spreadsheet Evolution

Authors
Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP; Martins, P; Pereira, R; Saraiva, J;

Publication
2014 9TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE QUALITY OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY (QUATIC)

Abstract
Software refactoring is a well-known technique that provides transformations on software artifacts with the aim of improving their overall quality. In this paper we present a set of refactorings for ClassSheets, a modeling language that allows to specify the business logic of a spreadsheet in an object-oriented fashion. The set of refactorings that we propose allows us to improve the quality of these spreadsheet models. Moreover, it is implemented in a setting that guarantees that all model refactorings are automatically carried to all the corresponding (spreadsheet) instances, thus providing an automatic evolution of the data so it is always synchronized with the model.

2017

Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages

Authors
Pereira, R; Couto, M; Ribeiro, F; Rua, R; Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP; Saraiva, J;

Publication
SLE'17: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 10TH ACM SIGPLAN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE LANGUAGE ENGINEERING

Abstract
This paper presents a study of the runtime, memory usage and energy consumption of twenty seven well-known software languages. We monitor the performance of such languages using ten different programming problems, expressed in each of the languages. Our results show interesting findings, such as, slower/faster languages consuming less/more energy, and how memory usage influences energy consumption. We show how to use our results to provide software engineers support to decide which language to use when energy efficiency is a concern.

2015

Design and Implementation of Queries for Model-Driven Spreadsheets

Authors
Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP; Mendes, J; Pereira, R; Saraiva, J;

Publication
Central European Functional Programming School, CEFP 2013

Abstract
This paper presents a domain-specific querying language for model-driven spreadsheets. We briefly show the design of the language and present in detail its implementation, from the denormalization of data and translation of our user-friendly query language to a more efficient query, to the execution of the query using Google. To validate our work, we executed an empirical study, comparing QuerySheet with an alternative spreadsheet querying tool, which produced positive results.

2014

Smelling Faults in Spreadsheets

Authors
Abreu, R; Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP; Martins, P; Perez, A; Saraiva, J;

Publication
2014 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION (ICSME)

Abstract
Despite being staggeringly error prone, spreadsheets are a highly flexible programming environment that is widely used in industry. In fact, spreadsheets are widely adopted for decision making, and decisions taken upon wrong (spreadsheet-based) assumptions may have serious economical impacts on businesses, among other consequences. This paper proposes a technique to automatically pinpoint potential faults in spreadsheets. It combines a catalog of spreadsheet smells that provide a first indication of a potential fault, with a generic spectrum-based fault localization strategy in order to improve (in terms of accuracy and false positive rate) on these initial results. Our technique has been implemented in a tool which helps users detecting faults. To validate the proposed technique, we consider a well-known and well-documented catalog of faulty spreadsheets. Our experiments yield two main results: we were able to distinguish between smells that can point to faulty cells from smells and those that are not capable of doing so; and we provide a technique capable of detecting a significant number of errors: two thirds of the cells labeled as faulty are in fact (documented) errors.

2016

User-friendly spreadsheet querying: an empirical study

Authors
Pereira, R; Saraiva, J; Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP;

Publication
Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Pisa, Italy, April 4-8, 2016

Abstract
Spreadsheets are nowadays used in a variety of contexts, including in in manipulatin large and complex data. This data is stored in a large unstructured matrix, which is hard to understand and to manipulate. Recent research has been done to manipulate and query such unstructured data, namely by proposing different query approaches to spreadsheets. In this paper we present an empirical study evaluating three recent query approaches to spreadsheets assessing their usage to query spreadsheets. The results of our study show that the end-users' productivity increases when using visual, model-driven queries are used. © 2016 ACM.

2013

Querying Model-Driven Spreadsheets

Authors
Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP; Mendes, J; Pereira, R; Saraiva, J;

Publication
2013 IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON VISUAL LANGUAGES AND HUMAN-CENTRIC COMPUTING (VL/HCC 2013)

Abstract
Spreadsheets are being used with many different purposes that range from toy applications to complete information systems. In any of these cases, they are often used as data repositories that can grow significantly. As the amount of data grows, it also becomes more difficult to extract concrete information out of them. This paper focuses on the problem of spreadsheet querying. In particular, we propose an expressive and composable technique where intuitive queries can be defined. Our approach builds on a model-driven spreadsheet development environment, and queries are expressed referencing entities in the model of a spreadsheet instead of in its actual data. Finally, the system that we have implemented relies on Google's query function for spreadsheets.

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