Locating User Interface Concepts in Source Code
Matúš Sulír, Jaroslav Porubän · DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · 2016
Developers often start their work by exploring a graphical user interface (GUI) of a program. They spot a textual label of interest in the GUI and try to find it in the source code, as a straightforward way of feature location. We performed a study on four Java applications, asking a simple question: Are strings displayed in the GUI of a running program present in its source code? We came to a conclusion that the majority of strings are present there; they occur mainly in Java and "properties" files.