Software developers have always been concerned with the quality of the products they produce. Although software engineers use new methods to evaluate the quality of their software, there are still some concerns in several of the methods they use when developing software, for example, when using Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). One of the main goals of DSLs is to ease the work of developers in different areas. However, to achieve this goal it is necessary to provide an evaluation of the usability of such languages. Although it is possible to find some experiments to evaluate such languages, usually this experiments are subjective and do not use techniques from the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) area. Therefore, this paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in which a discussion on the usability of DSLs is presented. This paper also presents a mapping to show how usability has been assessed by researchers in their work.

Abstract-Feature models are considered a reference in the majority of Software Product Line (SPL) methods. There are several different feature model notations to represent requirements of an SPL, at a higher or lower level of abstraction. Some notations present properties to distinguish functional, conceptual and non-functional features of an SPL. Non-functional requirements, especially those that involve the construction of user interfaces (UI), are usually not represented in the feature models, since the user interfaces are often created manually for each product. In this paper we present an experimental study performed in order to evaluate the effort required to, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of representing UI elements during the feature modeling of a Financial SPL. To this end, we applied the Odyssey-Fex and UI-Odyssey-Fex notations to design feature models from the perspective of Domain Engineers in the context of undergraduates, M.Sc. and Ph.D. students and software engineers with some expertise in SPL. Our results indicate that the effort to use the notations are similar, but the use of the UIOdyssey-Fex notation provides a better representativeness of UI elements.