TY - JOUR
T1 - Usability driven DSL development with USE-ME
AU - Barišić, Ankica
AU - Amaral, Vasco
AU - Goulão, Miguel
N1 - The authors would like to thank FCT/MEC NOVA LINCS; PEst UID/ CEC/04516/ 2013 and DSML4MA TUBITAK/0008/2014 Projects, as well as to COST Action IC1404 Multi-Paradigm Modelling for Cyber-Physical Systems (MPM4CPS) for the partial support to this work.
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - The adoption of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) is regarded as an approach to reduce the accidental complexity of software systems development. The availability of sophisticated language workbenches facilitates the development of DSLs making them increasingly more popular. The adoption of DSLs at large comes at the risk that a poorly designed DSL can be too hard to adopt by its domain users. As such, Usability is one of the essential characteristics to mitigate this risk as it has an important impact on the productivity achieved by DSL users. The current state of practice in Software Language Engineering (SLE) neglects the Usability of DSLs. A pertinent research question in SLE is how to engineer Usability into DSLs systematically. We argue that a timely systematic approach based on User Interface experimental evaluation techniques should be used to assess the impact of DSLs during their development process, while the cost of fixing the usability problems is relatively small, when compared to fixing them at the end of the development process. For that purpose, we introduce a conceptual framework, called USE-ME, which supports the iterative incremental development process of DSLs concerning the issue of their Usability evaluation. We illustrate the feasibility of the approach on a case study of the development of a DSL meant for children to program robots.
AB - The adoption of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) is regarded as an approach to reduce the accidental complexity of software systems development. The availability of sophisticated language workbenches facilitates the development of DSLs making them increasingly more popular. The adoption of DSLs at large comes at the risk that a poorly designed DSL can be too hard to adopt by its domain users. As such, Usability is one of the essential characteristics to mitigate this risk as it has an important impact on the productivity achieved by DSL users. The current state of practice in Software Language Engineering (SLE) neglects the Usability of DSLs. A pertinent research question in SLE is how to engineer Usability into DSLs systematically. We argue that a timely systematic approach based on User Interface experimental evaluation techniques should be used to assess the impact of DSLs during their development process, while the cost of fixing the usability problems is relatively small, when compared to fixing them at the end of the development process. For that purpose, we introduce a conceptual framework, called USE-ME, which supports the iterative incremental development process of DSLs concerning the issue of their Usability evaluation. We illustrate the feasibility of the approach on a case study of the development of a DSL meant for children to program robots.
KW - Domain-specific languages
KW - Experimental software engineering
KW - Quality in use
KW - Quality of DSLs
KW - Software language engineering
KW - Usability engineering
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85028946457&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cl.2017.06.005
DO - 10.1016/j.cl.2017.06.005
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85028946457
SN - 1477-8424
VL - 51
SP - 1339
EP - 1351
JO - Computer Languages, Systems and Structures
JF - Computer Languages, Systems and Structures
ER -