Static Analysis of Programs with Graphical User Interface

  • Authors:
  • Stefan Staiger

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Stuttgart

  • Venue:
  • CSMR '07 Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We describe a new approach for statically analyzing programs which have a graphical user interface (GUI). Our analysis detects the parts of the program which belong to the GUI, it detects widgets and hierarchies they form, and it shows the event handlers connected to events of those widgets. Besides supporting general program understanding, we show that this also supports control-flow analysis, architecture recovery, migration to GUI builders and mapping the visual appearance of the program to source code artefacts. Our tests indicate that the static analysis we propose is fast and useful.