Simplify model design in MDE approaches

Many academic works prove that Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) improves the quality of the application's production in software engineering. However, its adoption remains limited for several reasons: the complexity of the tools makes them less productive, the modeling languages and the mechanisms manipulating the models are hard to grasp. In that sense, low-code platforms are an interesting proposition. These low-code platforms, despite their simplicity of use, do not allow the design of large systems because of the opacity of the various artifacts (models, code, generation...). In our work, we want to improve the adoption of MDE models, tools, and mechanisms in application design process through a more simplified interaction. Rather than constraining the developer in a closed environment as it is the case with the Low-code platforms, we wish to allow him to have access, if he wishes, to models as well as the generation mechanisms of the application. We propose to build applications that are instrumented with modification actions on each element of their user interface. The applications are generated from models. A developer can modify or develop his application directly from the UI by calling upon the added modification actions. This makes his work easier by quickly locating (in the UI of the produced application) where to make the modifications and directly visualizing the result, rather than manually modifying each part of the model concerned. The instrumentation is based on a descriptive language for possible modification actions and a mechanism for injecting this language into the application generation chain. We have designed a demonstrator allowing us to conduct experiments, with various audience, in order to validate our work.