WARE: a tool for the reverse engineering of Web applications

TLDR

Web development is rapidly expanding, yet the industry’s pressure for short time‑to‑market and intense competition often leads to ad‑hoc coding and poor documentation, compromising application quality. This paper introduces a tool for reverse engineering Web applications. The tool employs UML diagrams to model multiple views of a Web application at different abstraction levels, and a case study demonstrated its ability to successfully recover and model real applications. The recovered UML diagrams enhance comprehension and support maintenance and evolution, as shown by the case study.

Abstract

The development of Web sites and applications is increasing dramatically to satisfy the market requests. The software industry is facing the new demand under the pressure of a very short time-to-market and an extremely high competition. As a result, Web sites and applications are usually developed without a disciplined process: Web applications are directly coded and no, or poor, documentation is produced to support the subsequent maintenance and evolution activities, thus compromising the quality of the applications. This paper presents a tool for reverse engineering Web applications. UML diagrams are used to model a set of views that depict several aspects of a Web application at different abstraction levels. The recovered diagrams ease the comprehension of the application and support its maintenance and evolution. A case study, carried out with the aim of assessing the effectiveness of the proposed tool, allowed relevant information about some real Web applications to be successfully recovered and modeled by UML diagrams.