Reverse engineering Web applications

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 article presents an approach for reverse engineering Web applications. The approach include the definition of reverse engineering methods and supporting software tools, that help to understand existing undocumented Web applications to be maintained or evolved, through the reconstruction of UML diagrams. Some validation experiments have been carried out and they showed the usefulness of the proposed approach and highlighted possible areas for improvement of its effectiveness.