Terekhov, Andrey; Bryksin, Timofey; Litvinov, Yurii. How to make visual modeling more attractive to software developers / 11th LASER Summer School on Software Engineering. Leading-Edge Software Engineering. September 7-13, 2014 - Elba Island, Italy

DRAKON language usability heuristics

Several usability heuristics were taken from the DRAKON visual language10 that was created in a way to ensure good readability of created diagrams and comfort of

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10 DRAKON visual language, URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON

We realized that general-purpose languages such as UML are too cumbersome quite a long time ago. It is too complex and expensive to use them as a replacement for textual languages in real industrial practice.

Small specialized languages "sharpened" on narrow domain areas (DSLs, Domain Specific Languages) in this sense are much more convenient. They are more expressive and allow automatic generation of effective source or binary code.

Domain experts can easily study these languages. There are studies that show 5-10 times productivity increase of mobile application developers who used DSLs compared to those who used traditional programming [7]. Our experience with DSLs for programming robots [15] shows similar results.

Evidently, it is too expensive to implement graphic editors, code generators, run-time environment, debuggers, etc. for each particular DSL. A better solution is to create a meta-technology, or a domain-specific modeling (DSM) platform, that could generate all necessary tools from compact formal description of desired DSL.

There are several meta-technologies in the market right now, but some of them are strictly tied to a specific platform (e.g. Visual Studio Visualization and Modeling SDK7), others are so overwhelmed with features that are quite difficult to use (e.g. Eclipse Graphical Modeling Project8) or expensive and not widely distributed (e.g. MetaEdit+9), so we decided to develop our own meta-technology using our experience in this area.

Main contribution of this article is the statement that for a success of visual modeling user-friendliness and convenience of tools are crucial. This statement is supported by an extensive overview of existing empirical research on why visual modeling is not so widely used as it could be.

Заведующий кафедрой системного программирования Математико-механического факультета Санкт-Петербургского университета Андрей Терехов приехал (по следам Наполеона) на остров Эльба в Италии и заявил, что язык ДРАКОН повлиял на "QReal DSM platform".
"we decided to develop our own meta-technology using our experience in this area"