Reverse Engineering Web Applications: the WARE Approach

The rapid, progressive diffusion of Web applications in several productive contexts of our modern society is laying the foundations of a renewed scenario of software development, where one of the emerging problems is that of defining and validating cost-effective approaches for maintaining and evolving these software systems. Due to several factors, the solution to this problem is not straightforward. The heterogeneous and dynamic nature of components making up a Web application, the lack of effective programming mechanisms for implementing basic software engineering principles in it, and undisciplined development processes induced by the high pressure of a very short time-to-market, make Web application maintenance a challenging problem. A relevant issue consists of reusing the methodological and technological experience in the sector of traditional software maintenance, and exploring the opportunity of using reverse engineering to support effective Web application maintenance. This paper presents an approach for defining reverse engineering processes involving Web applications. The approach has been used to implement a process, including reverse engineering methods and a supporting software tool, that helps to understand existing undocumented Web applications to be maintained or evolved, through the reconstruction of UML diagrams. The proposed reverse engineering process has been submitted to a validation experiment, the results of which showed the usability of the process for reverse engineering Web applications with different characteristics, and highlighted possible areas for improvement of its effectiveness. The experiment and the lessons learned from it are presented in the paper.