Involving End-users in Domain-Specific Languages Development - Experiences from a Bioinformatics SME

Abstract

Involving end-users in software development is a goal envisioned by the Software Engineering community. As they have the domain knowledge, it is feasible to develop software applications that really fulfil their requirements. Domain-specific languages (DSL) are widely applied to accomplish this vision. However, end-users collaboration in DSL development is also important to ensure that their needs are well understood and represented. This research work proposes a DSL development process that combines methodological guidelines for DSL development with good practices from agile methods to encourage end-user involvement. In this paper, we overview the complete process and we focus on the two first stages: Decision and Analysis. In order to illustrate the proposal, it is applied in the development of a DSL for a bioinformatics SME that works on genetic disease diagnosis.