Domain Analysis of Graphical User Interfaces of Software Systems

Domain analysis (DA) is the rst phase of software systen development. A person who performs DA is called a domain analyst. The task of a domain analyst is to collect information about a domain with the goal of developing a new software system. Usually, this task is manual and time-tedious, because the data have to be manually gathered from dierent sources such as existing documents, domain experts or existing applications in the domain. This work is a contribution in the eld of domain analysis of software systems. Our goal is to reduce the time and eort of domain analysts by supporting an automated creation of domain models. The goal is achieved through domain-specic language (DSL) development, thus we also contribute to the eld of DSL development. We present a unique method for domain analysis of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of existing software systems. The output of the method is a formal, platform-independent domain model, which is then used to generate a DSL implementation - classes representing the language model and a language parser. Since the domain model is platformindependent, it can be utilized also in other processes. These processes are described in the work and their utilization is demonstrated in the experimental part. We developed a prototype to experimentally verify the proposed method. Besides the primary feature of creating DSLs from existing GUIs, the prototype also supports formalization of the domain model into ontologies. The prototype was used in three experiments: to experimentally verify the method on 32 existing applications, to develop 9 DSLs and to compare two systems using onRecommended by thesis supervisor: Prof. Jaroslav