Dynamic Reverse Engineering of Graphical User Interfaces

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2012

Authors

Inês Coimbra Morgado (Author) FEUP; Ana C. R. Paiva (Author) FEUP; João Pascoal Faria (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: International Journal on Advances in Software

Vol. 5 No. 3&4

Pages: 223-235

ISSN: 1942-2628

Publisher: International Academy, Research and Industry Association

Scientific classification

FOS: Engineering and technology > Electrical engineering, Electronic engineering, Information engineering

Other information

Abstract (EN): This paper describes a dynamic reverse engineering approach and a tool, ReGUI, developed to reduce the effort of obtaining models of the structure and behaviour of a software application’s Graphical User Interface (GUI). The architecture of the REGUI tool, the process followed to extract the information and the different types of models produced to represent the information collected are described. The different representations of the collected data describe different characteristics of the GUI. Besides several graphical representations, the tool also generates a textual model in Spec# to be used in the context of model based GUI testing and a SMV model, which enables the verification of several properties expressed in computation tree logic (CTL). The models produced must be completed and validated in order to ensure that they faithfully describe the intended behaviour. This validation process may be performed manually by looking to the graphical models produced or by automatically proving properties, such as reachability, through model checking. A case study is described to illustrate the overall approach, the tool and the results obtained.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific