Quality in Use of DSLs: Current Evaluation Methods

International audience ; Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are claimed to contribute to increment productivity, while reducing the required maintenance and programming expertise. In this context, the usability of these languages becomes a major issue: if the language is not easy to learn and use, it is unlikely to be successfully adopted. It is important to foster high quality DSLs during its engineering process. We argue that a systematic approach based on User Interface Experimental validation techniques should be used to assess the impact of the introduction of DSLs in the productivity of DSL user. Productivity can be fostered by assessing important usability attributes early in the language construction. This work's contribution, besides highlighting the problem of the absence of systematic approaches for experimental validation of DSLs in general, is to identify existing evaluation approaches that can be adapted from the field of User Interfaces.