Dynamic reverse engineering of GUI models for testing

A significant challenge in application of model-based testing (MBT) is that manually designing the test models requires considerable amount of effort and deep expertise in formal modeling. Reverse engineering can be used to automate parts of the modeling process but in applications with a graphical user interface (GUI), the dynamic behavior of the GUI is difficult to extract with static reverse engineering. Therefore we propose to use dynamic reverse engineering for automatically generating GUI models suitable for MBT. In this paper we compare various approaches for automated GUI modeling including an empirical tool study, propose a GUI component classification suitable for GUI automation, and present some examples of GUI automation strategies for efficient modeling of GUI applications.