UI-Tracer

Abstract

The ability to understand software systems is crucial to identify hidden threats or maintain software systems over many years. Still software comprehension activities take up around 58% of software development time. While most approaches support the comprehension of a software system's code perspective, its connection to the user perspective of is barely explored. We present UI-Tracer, a lightweight support for tracing user interface elements to source code using the version history of a system. The evaluation on two open source systems shows that the approach can cover all UI elements that have been changed or added within the accessible part of the version history. Furthermore, the median numbers of files flagged as potentially responsible for a UI element is 8 and 3 for the two studied systems. Thus, UI-Tracer provides an easy starting ground for developers to identify files relevant for future UI changes.