A requirements engineering approach for usability-driven DSL development

Abstract

There is currently a lack of Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches applied to, or supporting, the development of a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) taking into account the environment in which it is to be used. We present a model-based RE approach to support DSL development with a focus on usability concerns. RDAL is a RE fragment language that can be complemented with other languages to support RE and design. USE-ME is a model driven approach for DSLs usability evaluation which is integrable with a DSL development approach. We combine RDAL and a new DSL, named DSSL, that we created for the specification of DSL-based systems. Integrated with this combination we add USE-ME to support usability evaluation. This combination of existing languages and tools provides a comprehensive RE approach for DSL development. We illustrate the approach with the development of the Gyro DSL for programming robots.