VID2XML: Automatic Extraction of a Complete XML Data From Mobile Programming Screencasts
Mohammad D. Alahmadi · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · 2022
Developers often refer to video-hosting online platforms to find screencasts that provide a step-by-step guide to help them solve a programming task at hand or learn a new concept. More specifically, developers search for resources that help them design and implement effective mobile graphical user interfaces (GUI) usingXML. Although mobile programming screencasts contain a vast amount ofXMLdata at developers’ disposal, they cannot be easily found and copied-pasted due to the image nature of videos. Given that the most common task developers perform online is copy-pasting, mobile programming screencasts must support that and be complemented withXMLdata in a textual format. To overcome this challenge and aid developers, this paper presentsvid2XML, which is a three-phase approach that leverages both visual and textual information of video frames to locateXMLregion in video frames, locate the currently opened file, and extractXMLdata for each file presented in video frames. We evaluated each phase ofvid2XMLin a comprehensive empirical evaluation on videos collected from YouTube. The results reveal thatvid2XMLis able to accurately (i) locateXMLregions, outperforming four previous work, (ii) locate the bounding box of the selected file, and (iii) extract, fix, and mergeXMLdata for each file opened/created in a video.