A Longitudinal Field Study on Creation and Use of Domain-Specific Languages in Industry

Abstract

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) have extensively been investigated in research and have frequently been applied in practice for over 20 years. While DSLs have been attributed improvements in terms of productivity, maintainability, and taming accidental complexity, surprisingly, we know little about their actual impact on the software engineering practice. This PhD project, that is done in close collaboration with our industrial partner Océ - A Canon Company, offers a unique opportunity to study the application of DSLs using a longitudinal field study. In particular, we focus on introducing DSLs with language workbenches, i.e., infrastructures for designing and deploying DSLs, for projects that are already running for several years and for which extensive domain analysis outcomes are available. In doing so, we expect to gain a novel perspective on DSLs in practice. Additionally, we aim to derive best practices for DSL development and to identify and overcome limitations in the current state-of-the-art tooling for DSLs.