Ankica Barisic

Quality in use of domain-specific languages: a case study

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are claimed to increment productivity, while reducing the required maintenance and programming expertise. In this context, DSLs usability is a key factor for its successful adoption. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach based on User Interfaces Experimental validation techniques to assess the impact of the introduction of DSLs on the productivity of domain experts. To illustrate this evaluation approach we present a case study of a DSL for High Energy Physics (HEP). The DSL on this case study, called Pheasant (PHysicists EAsy Analysis Tool), is assessed in contrast with a pre-existing baseline, using General Purpose Languages (GPLs) such as C++. The comparison combines quantitative and qualitative data, collected with users from a real-world setting. Our assessment includes Physicists with programming experience with two profiles; ones with no experience with the previous framework used in the project and other experienced. This works contribution highlights the problem of the absence of systematic approaches for experimental validation of DSLs. It also illustrates how an experimental approach can be used in the context of a DSL evaluation during the Software Languages Engineering activity, with respect to its impact on effectiveness and efficiency.

How to reach a usable DSL? Moving toward a Systematic Evaluation

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are claimed to increase productivity, while reducing the required maintenance and programming expertise. In this context, DSL usability by domain experts is a key factor for its successful adoption. Evidence that support those improvement claims is mostly anecdotal. Our systematic literature review showed that a usability evaluation was often skipped, relaxed, or at least omitted from papers reporting the development of DSLs. The few exceptions mostly take place at the end of the development process where fixing problems identified is too expensive. We argue that a systematic approach based on User Interface experimental validation techniques should be used to assess the impact of the new DSLs. The rationale is that assessing important and specially tailored usability attributes for DSLs early in language construction will ultimately foster a higher productivity of the DSL users. This paper, besides discussing the quality criteria, proposes a development and evaluation process that can be used to achieve usable DSLs in a better way.

The RPG DSL: a case study of language engineering using MDD for generating RPG games for mobile phones

It is typical in the domain of digital games to have many development problems due to its increasing complexity. Those difficulties include: i)little code reuse in order to develop a cross-platform game; and ii)performing games verification through extensive and expensive tests. This of course results in low productivity in the development (evolution and maintenance) of game solutions. In this paper, we present a domain-specific language (DSL) for a Role-Playing Game (RPG) product lines, which was completely built using a software development technique driven by high level abstractions---called Model-Driven Development (MDD). Also, we discuss and demonstrate the several benefits of applying MDD in terms of rapid prototyping of cross-platform games, and their evaluation by means of static and dynamic verification of the games logic properties.

Usability Driven DSL development with USE-ME

Abstract 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.