GUI reverse engineering with machine learning

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach to reduce the effort of building formal models representative of the structure and behaviour of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). The main goal is to automatically extract the GUI model with a dynamic reverse engineering process, consisting in an exploration phase, that extracts information by interacting with the GUI, and in a model generation phase that, making use of machine learning techniques, uses the extracted information of the first step to generate a state-machine model of the GUI, including guard conditions to remove ambiguity in transitions.