Publication
GUIsurfer: a tool for reverse engineering of graphical user interfaces
| Summary: | Tools are currently available to developers that allow for fast development of user interfaces with graphical components. However, the design of interactive systems does not seem to be much improved by the use of such tools. Interfaces are often difficult to understand and use for end users. In many cases users have problems in identifying all the supported tasks of a system, or in understanding how to achieve their goals. Moreover, the code produced by such tools is difficult to understand and maintain. In the context of an ongoing effort to develop tools to support the automated analysis of interactive system designs, we investigate the applicability of reverse engineering approaches to graphical user interface (GUIS) source code. Our objective consists in developing tools to automatically extract models containing all possible GUI behaviors, from its source code. The model should specify when a particular GUI event can occur, which are the related conditions, which system actions are executed and which GUI state is generated next. We want to to be able to reason about and test this GUI model in order to analyse aspects of the original applications behavior, and the quality of the implementation. GUISURFER, a tool developed in the context of this doctoral thesis, is capable of automatically deriving and reason about graphical user interface behavioral models of applications written in Java/Swing and WxHaskell. This work is useful to enable the analysis of existing interactive applications, and also when an existing application must be ported or simply updated. |
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| Main Authors: | Silva, João Carlos |
| Year: | 2010 |
| Country: | Portugal |
| Document type: | doctoral thesis |
| Access type: | restricted access |
| Associated institution: | Universidade do Minho |
| Language: | Portuguese |
| Origin: | RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho |
| Summary: | Tools are currently available to developers that allow for fast development of user interfaces with graphical components. However, the design of interactive systems does not seem to be much improved by the use of such tools. Interfaces are often difficult to understand and use for end users. In many cases users have problems in identifying all the supported tasks of a system, or in understanding how to achieve their goals. Moreover, the code produced by such tools is difficult to understand and maintain. In the context of an ongoing effort to develop tools to support the automated analysis of interactive system designs, we investigate the applicability of reverse engineering approaches to graphical user interface (GUIS) source code. Our objective consists in developing tools to automatically extract models containing all possible GUI behaviors, from its source code. The model should specify when a particular GUI event can occur, which are the related conditions, which system actions are executed and which GUI state is generated next. We want to to be able to reason about and test this GUI model in order to analyse aspects of the original applications behavior, and the quality of the implementation. GUISURFER, a tool developed in the context of this doctoral thesis, is capable of automatically deriving and reason about graphical user interface behavioral models of applications written in Java/Swing and WxHaskell. This work is useful to enable the analysis of existing interactive applications, and also when an existing application must be ported or simply updated. |
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Funded activities
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