Usability evaluation framework for domain-specific language

Abstract

Software engineers are increasingly taking advantage of new methods to improve software quality. The use of languages developed for specific domains, which in the literature are known as Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), has grown in the past years. Although several experimental studies that subjectively evaluate usability of these languages can be found in the literature, few of them have taken advantage of applying Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques in those evaluations. Therefore, the main goals of this paper are to present a usability evaluation framework for DSLs, called Usa-DSL, and to show the evaluation of the framework through a Focus Group method. The evaluation was performed by seven specialists that discussed the framework usability and suggested some modifications of our initial proposal. The specialists recommendations were incorporated in the final framework presented in this paper.