An Iterative Approach for the Reverse Engineering of Rich Internet Application User Interfaces

Comprehending and modeling the behavior of user interfaces exposed by Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are important activities in software maintenance, testing, and evolution. This paper presents an `agile´ process for the reverse engineering of Rich Internet Application User Interfaces: the process is based on dynamic analysis of the application, is iterative and exploits heuristic clustering criteria for reducing the data gathered by dynamic analysis. Moreover, it is based on the continuous validation feedback of the process executor, and allows the incremental reconstruction of a Finite State Machine for modeling the behavior of RIA GUIs. This approach is supported by CReRIA, an integrated reverse engineering environment that provides automatic facilities for executing the process and incrementally recovering the FSM model. A preliminary experiment involving the analysis of three real Web applications showed the feasibility of the approach, and highlighted interesting advantages of using the agility in reverse engineering processes.