A system for application reference testing (SMART) solves the technical problem of generating test data and test cases from graphical user interface applications (GAPs) to test web services, effectively and non-invasively. SMART allows organizations to easily and promptly identify and resolve software bugs, ensure higher quality software and development productivity, complete software projects faster, deliver software products to market quicker, and improve the return on investment for software development projects. SMART provides a user friendly visualization mechanism that interacts with an accessibility layer to enable organizations to economically and easily define user interactions with GAPs, by performing point-and-click, drag-and-drop operations on the GAPs, and generate reusable test data and test cases for web services.