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.