As indicated above, an exemplary feature of the present invention is to automatically identify corresponding GUI elements on different computer systems, or the same computer system at different points in time. Specifically, under the present invention, a user action on a widget of a GUI provided by an application loaded a first computer system is observed, and information about the widget(s) involved in the user action as well as on all other widget(s) in the GUI is collected and associated with the user action. Thereafter a widget(s) (on which the user action is to be performed) of a GUI provided by the application as loaded on a second computer system is robustly identified using the collection information. Then, the action is performed on the identified widget(s). In identifying the widget(s), the present invention utilizes a set of hard and soft constraints to identify a matching widget(s).