Using reverse engineering for automated usability evaluation of GUI-based applications

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are important parts of today’s software and their usability ensures the usefulness of the overall software. A popular technique to check the usability of GUIs is by performing usability evaluations either manually or automatically using tools. While manual evaluation is resource intensive, performing automatic usability evaluation usually involves the creation of a model of the GUI, a significant resource-intensive step that intimidates many practitioners and prevents the application of the automated techniques. This chapter presents “GUI ripping,” a new process that automatically recovers models of the GUI by dynamically “traversing” all its windows and extracting all the widgets, properties, and values. The usefulness of this process is demonstrated by recovering a structural model called a GUI forest and dynamic models called event-flow graphs and integration trees. Results of case studies show that GUI ripping is effective and requires very little human intervention.