Inferring User Interface Patterns from Execution Traces of Web Applications

This paper presents a dynamic reverse engineering approach to extract User Interface (UI) Patterns from existent Web Applications. Firstly, information related to user interaction is saved, in particular: user actions and parameters; the HTML source pages; and the URLs. Secondly, the collected information is analysed in order to calculate several metrics (e.g., the differences between subsequent HTML pages). Thirdly, the existent UI Patterns are inferred from the overall information calculated based on a set of heuristic rules. The overall reverse engineering approach is evaluated with some experiments over several public Web Applications.

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