Dynamic Reverse Engineering of Graphical User Interfaces

This paper presents 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 applications Graphical User Interface (GUI). It describes, in more detail, the architecture of the REGUI tool, the process followed to extract information and the different types of models produced to represent such information. Each model describes different characteristics of the GUI. Besides graphical representations, which allow checking visually properties of the GUI, the tool also generates a textual model in Spec# to be used in the context of model based GUI testing and a Symbolic Model Verification model, which enables the verification of several properties expressed in computation tree logic. 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 by manually analysing the graphical models produced or automatically by proving properties, such as reachability, through model checking. A feasibility study is described to illustrate the overall approach, the tool and the results obtained.

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