Reverse Engineering of Graphical User Interfaces Using Static Analyses

Abstract

This paper describes static analyses for reverse engineering graphical user interfaces (GUIs). These analyses, implemented in the Bauhaus tool suite, support typical maintenance tasks like migrating from a hand-written GUI to so-called GUI builders and redocumentation of the GUI. Our tool extracts the program's windows and their structure, the attributes of the widgets and their values, the GUI events that might occur at runtime, and the event handlers associated with those events. We explain our approach and report encouraging results for several programs.

GUI Migration using MDE from GWT to Angular 6: An Industrial Case

“…Fleurey et al [3], Lelli et al [7], Silva et al [15] and Staiger [16] used tools that analyze source code of desktop applications. The tools look for widget definition in the source code, then they analyze the methods that invoked or are invoked by the widgets and identify the relationships between widgets and their visual properties.…”

Creating models of interactive systems with the support of lightweight reverse-engineering tools

“…Another relevant study in this area has been conducted by Staiger [16]. It proposes an approach for analysing graphical user interface (GUI) programs by statically detecting GUI program parts and widgets with the hierarchies they form, showing event handlers connected to events of those widgets.…”

Model driven reverse engineering of user interface — A comparative study of static and dynamic model generation tools

“…Same researchers in [4] have used static analysis techniques for generating the models of the user interface behavior from the source code and have shown how the graph theory can be useful when applied to these models for developing a tool to enable the analysis of interactive system through GUI source code inspection. [3] describes a tool that extracts program's window and their structure, the attributes of a widget and their values, the GUI events and their event handlers by static analysis of a hand written GUI for migration to GUI builder tools.…”