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.