Comparative analysis of GUI reverse engineering techniques

Abstract

With the increasing number of mobile devices, the demand for mobile applications is ever increasing. Mobile applications are recently moving to more business-critical areas, becoming more and more complex, hence making it difficult to understand their behavior. Reverse engineering has been embraced by the software engineering community to improve their ability to understand a given system quickly by creating models of a system. The aim of this paper is to investigate the state-of-art in reverse engineering of GUI applications. The focus is on mobile applications reverse engineering techniques based on the point of GUI models generation, where the generated models can be used for program comprehension and testing. Firstly, we performed an exhaustive literature review on GUI reverse engineering approaches for model generation, followed by an assessment of capabilities of the reverse engineering techniques/tool for mobile applications based on the approaches. A discussion is presented on the result of the comparative assessment. Based on the results, limitations of the techniques and approaches in GUI model generation were identified and the areas that require further improvements were identified.