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.

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 (PHysicist's 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 work's 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.

For years the development of software artifacts was the sole domain of developers and project managers. However, experience has taught us that the Users play a very important role in software development and construction. On Domain Specific Languages the inclusion of the domain experts directly in the development cycle is a very important characteristic, as they have often an important role in making and constraining the domain of the language.DSLs are credited with increased productivity and ease of use, but this fact is hardly ever proven. Moreover, usability tests are frequently only performed at the final stages of the project when changes have a significant impact on the budget. To help prevent this, in this paper we present a pattern language for evaluating the usability of DSLs. Our patterns can help show how to use an iterative usability validation development strategy to produce DSLs that can achieve a high degree of usability.

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) empower end-users to express software tasks that were traditionally developed by software engineers. DSLs allow users to express themselves in terms closer to the way they think about their problems, rather than in computational terms. However, conceiving a DSL with an adequate user experience for its end-users is not a trivial task, and the process of engineering that adequacy tends to be performed ad-hoc. The Gyro Creator Language (GCL) is an open-source DSL for controlling low-cost rover-like Arduino robots, designed for being used by teenagers with no previous computing skills, so they can be introduced to programming in a fun way. In this paper, we discuss an iterative process building on teenagers' early feedback, collected in a series of empirical evaluations with 128 teenagers, and how this has helped us driving GCL to a competitive level in terms of usability, when compared to well-established alternatives such as Lego, or Scratch.

For years the development of software artifacts was the sole domain of developers and project managers. However, experience has taught us that the Users play a very important role in software development and construction. On Domain Specific Languages the inclusion of the domain experts directly in the development cycle is a very important characteristic, as they have often an important role in making and constraining the domain of the language.DSLs are credited with increased productivity and ease of use, but this fact is hardly ever proven. Moreover, usability tests are frequently only performed at the final stages of the project when changes have a significant impact on the budget. To help prevent this, in this paper we present a pattern language for evaluating the usability of DSLs. Our patterns can help show how to use an iterative usability validation development strategy to produce DSLs that can achieve a high degree of usability.