Reverse Engineering – Recent Advances and Applications

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32 Reverse Engineering – Recent Advances and Applications 2 Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH for the 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 by 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 (Loer & Harrison, 2005). Moreover, these tools produce spaghetti code which is difficult to understand and maintain. The generated code is composed by call-back procedures for most widgets like buttons, scroll bars, menu items, and other widgets in the interface. These procedures are called by the system when the user interacts with the system through widget’s event. Graphical user interfaces may contains hundreds of widgets, and therefore many call-back procedures which makes difficult to understand and maintain the source code (Myers, 1991). At the same time it is important to ensure that GUI based applications behave as expected (Memon, 2001). The correctness of the GUI is essential to the correct execution of the software (Berard, 2001). Regarding user interfaces, correctness is usually expressed as usability: the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which users can use the system to achieve their goals (Abowd et al., 1989; SC4, 1994). The main objective of this Chapter consists in developing tools to automatically extract models containing the GUI behaviour. We call this reverse engineering the GUI source code. Models allow designers to analyse systems and could be used to validate system requirements at reasonable cost (Miller et al., 2004). Different types of models can be used for interactive systems, like user and task models. Models must specify which GUI components are present in the interface and their relationship, when a particular GUI event may occur and the associated conditions, which system actions are executed and which GUI state is generated next. Another goal of this Chapter is to be able to reason about in order to analyse aspects of the original application’s usability, and the implementation quality. This work will be useful to enable the analysis of existing interactive applications and to evolve/update existing applications (Melody, 1996). In this case, being able to reason at a higher level of abstraction than that of code will help in guaranteeing that the new/updated user interface has the same characteristics of the previous one. 1.3 Structure of the chapter This Chapter is structured into three main parts. Part 1 (Section 2) presents the reverse engineering area relating it to the GUI modelling area. Reverse engineering techniques’ state of the art, related work and additional methodologies used within this research are firstly described. Then, the Section follows with a review of the approaches to model GUIs. A graphical user interface representation is exposed, and the aspects usually specified by graphical user interfaces are described. Part 2 (Sections 3, 4, 5 and 6)presents the approach proposed in this Chapter. Section 3 presents methodologies to retargetable GUI reverse engineering. Section 4 presents the GUISURFER: the developed reverse engineering tool. It describes the GUISURFER architecture, the techniques applied for GUI reverse engineering and respective generated models. Then, Section 5, describe the research about GUI reasoning through behavioural models of interactive applications. Section 6 describes the application of GUISURFER to a realistic third-party application.
GUIsurfer: A Reverse Engineering Framework for User Interface Software GUIsurfer: A Reverse Engineering Framework for User Interface Software 3 Finally, the last part (Section 7) presents conclusions, discussing the contributions achieved with this research, and indicating possible directions for future work. 2. Reverse engineering applied to GUI modelling In the Software Engineering area, the use of reverse engineering approaches has been explored in order to derive models directly from existing systems. Reverse engineering is a process that helps understand a computer system. Similarly, user interface modelling helps designers and software engineers understand an interactive application from a user interface perspective. This includes identifying data entities and actions that are present in the user interface, as well as relationships between user interface objects. In this Section, reverse engineering and user interface modelling aspects are described (Campos, 2004; Duke & Harrison, 1993). Section 2.1 provides details about the reverse engineering area. Then, the type of GUIs models to be used is discussed in Section 2.2. Finally, the last Section summarizes the Section presenting some conclusions. 2.1 Reverse engineering Reverse engineering is useful in several tasks like documentation, maintenance, and re-engineering (E. Stroulia & Sorenson, 2003). In the software engineering area, the use of reverse engineering approaches has been explored in order to derive models directly from existing interactive system using both static and dynamics analysis (Chen & Subramaniam, 2001; Paiva et al., 2007; Systa, 2001). Static analysis is performed on the source code without executing the application. Static approaches are well suited for extracting information about the internal structure of the system, and about dependencies among structural elements. Classes, methods, and variables information can be obtained from the analysis of the source code. On the contrary, dynamic analysis extracts information from the application by executing it (Moore, 1996). Within a dynamic approach the system is executed and its external behaviour is analysed. Program analysis, plan recognition and redocumentation are applications of reverse engineering (Müller et al., 2000). Source code program analysis is an important goal of reverse engineering. It enables the creation of a model of the analysed program from its source code. The analysis can be performed at several different levels of abstraction. Plan recognition aims to recognize structural or behavioural patterns in the source code. Pattern-matching heuristics are used on source code to detect patterns of higher abstraction levels in the lower level code. Redocumentation enables one to change or create documentation for an existing system from source code. The generation of the documentation can be considered as the generation of a higher abstraction level representation of the system. 2.2 Types of GUI relevant models Model-based development of software systems, and of interactive computing systems in particular, promotes a development life cycle in which models guide the development process, and are iteratively refined until the source code of the system is obtained. Models can be used to capture, not only the envisaged design, but also its rational, thus documenting the decision process undertook during development. Hence, they provide valuable information for the maintenance and evolution of the systems. 33
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