Evaluating the usability in domain-specific languages

Abstract

Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) represent software abstractions that provide semantic to a specific class or domain. DSLs use the concepts and rules from the field or domain to strengthen ties between the domain expert and the technology. Although several DSLs are modeled by considering quality features, most do not have high-quality characteristics related to their usability or do not address them. However, this characteristic constitutes a key aspect for software engineers and domain experts while designing their solutions. Therefore, this paper presents a usability quality model for DSLs aligned to the ISO / IEC 25010 standard and an evaluation model based on the ISO / IEC 25040 standard. Finally, the evaluation method was applied in order to show its feasibility by a case study that addresses the use of two DSLs (related to Ambient Assisted Living and Cloud Computing domain) and assesses their usability.