Towards a Domain-Specific Language to Specify Interaction Scenarios for Web-Based Graphical User Interfaces

Abstract

The communication gap between software developers and subjectmatter experts is one of the foremost long-standing problems in software development. The level of formality of the user requirements specification has a strong impact on the ability of these two groups to communicate effectively. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are seen as one of the potential solutions to address this issue by raising the abstraction level of the software specification while keeping the necessary formalism to allow for software analysis, design, and verification. This paper discusses the ongoing development of a high-level DSL and its rich editing environment to allow the specification of consistent and testable interaction scenarios as user requirements for web-based graphical user interfaces. The language grammar has been developed based on the Gherkin syntax that supports Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). Results of a preliminary evaluation regarding the consistency of actions and states of interaction elements specified for web user interfaces showed that the grammar is able to support a consistent specification of BDD scenarios as user requirements at the interaction level. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Domain specific languages; • Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools.

Towards a Domain-Specific Language for Behaviour-Driven Development

“…The example starts by defining the domain model sample which uses the interactive model widgets. This interactive model has been proposed in our previous work [8] to define the behaviour supported by typical widgets on web graphical user interfaces. Other interactive models can be easily created/used to specify the interactive behaviour on other interaction environments.…”

“…For that, we introduce in this paper a high-level domainspecific languages (DSL) for the specification of consistent BDD scenarios as user requirements at different levels of abstraction. We build on our previous work [8] to implement a language model that supports the specification of BDD scenarios referring to the business domain, regardless of the interaction expected to happen on the user interface. The DSL further supports tying domain and interactive behaviours seamlessly in the scenario specification.…”

Towards a Low-Code Programming Environment for Robot-Assisted Physical Training Activities

“…The proposed DSL is inspired by Silva [8] and was developed using the Xtext framework [9]. Programs are designed in textual artifacts called model files comprising structural and logical specification sections.…”