How to reach a usable DSL? Moving toward a Systematic Evaluation

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are claimed to increase productivity,while reducing the required maintenance and programming expertise.  In thiscontext, DSL usability by domain experts is a key factor for its successfuladoption.Evidence that support those improvement claims is mostly anecdotal.  Oursystematic literature review showed that a usability evaluation was oftenskipped, relaxed, or at least omitted from papers reporting the development of DSLs.  Thefew exceptions mostly take place at the end of the development process where fixing problems identified is too expensive.We argue that a systematic approach based on User Interface experimentalvalidation  techniques should be used to assess the impact of the new DSLs.  The rationale is that assessing important and specially tailored usability attributes for DSLs early in language construction will ultimately foster a higher productivity of the DSL users. This paper, besides discussing thequality criteria, proposes a development and evaluation process that can be usedto achieve usable DSLs in a better way

Safety analysis of inconsistencies using a formal verification tool for DSML

Product Solution (short)International audienceSafety software engineers lack automatic interaction tools during Autonomous Vehicle development, which can help them check the correctness of safety rules, ensure the system reliability in countless possible situations and its resistance to possible environmental conditions.In this paper, we discuss the benefits of the proposed approach to tackling these problems by proposing a language to safety software engineers to define formal safety requirements that follow one common format in the safety domain.Our framework is in charge of generating the verification engine to check inconsistencies and deploying a chosen solver. We discuss the necessity of using a SAT solver. The validity of the approach is illustrated in an application to a use case with a formal safety goal defined from a scenario.Our approach allows the safety software engineer to detect rule inconsistencies from his defined requirements and proceed to a modification

Sustainability in Modelling of Cyber-Physical Systems: A Systematic Literature Review - Intermediate Technical Report

Background: Supporting sustainability is becoming an active area of research. We want to contribute the first Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in this field over the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) to aid researchers who are motivated to contribute to that topic by providing a body of knowledge as starting point. Aim: We aim to provide an overview of different approaches of sustainability which can be incorporated into modelling of CPS with regard to research activity, investigated topics, identified limitations, proposed approaches, used methods, available studies, and considered domains. Method: The applied method is an SLR in four reliable and commonly-used databases according to the protocol by Kitchenham et al. We assessed the results of each database in the period from 2011 to 2017. Results: We identify the 680 candidates which are to be reviewed

USE-ME Empirical evaluation pilot study

We report on the pilot assessment of the feasibility of the USE-ME tool with master students in computer science which were involved into a DSL course. In total there were four groups consisted of two or three participants which were developing the following DSLs:DSL Spreadsheets - a DSL transforms an activity graph into a Gantt chart. The target users of this DSL are to be project managers.Gestures Kinect - a DSL which supports specification of communication between navy users using a Kinect device. The target users of this DSL are to be a navy operators.Peddy Paper - a DSL which creates several instances of personalised paddy papers. The target users are paddy paper builders.Smart House - a DSL which supports a design of the elements and operations that the house can have. It is meant to be used by house owners. The evaluation consisted of three learning session. The first one took place after four weeks of the DSL development. Students were introduced to the usability evaluation during a 2h theoretical lecture. For next 2h were introduced with the USE-ME tool and were guided to perform installation and set up working environment. Also, the students were given a participation questionnaire to fill in and describe a purpose of their DSL. In the end of a session, they were given the background questionnaire to fill till the following session which was happening 1 week after. Following two weekly 4h sessions were consisting of USE-ME hands on. The students were introduced to the modelling activities followed by Visualino example. For each activity, the same student from the group was using the tool to create USE-ME models for their DSL, while other students from the group were helping in deciding what would be a right specification. Finally, students were asked to try to finish the learned models and deliver them as a part of DSL course. After delivery, the students which were using the tool to model were asked to fill in a feedback questionnaire. The evaluation deliveries related to each DSL (project reports, USE-ME models), and ones related to participants (background and feedback questionnaire), as well as evaluation results, are attached in this data set

Model-driven approach for the design of multi-chain smart contracts

International audienceBlockchain-based smart contracts provide transparent automation in a broad range of services, including finance, the Internet of Things, and autonomous systems. However, the implementation of such services may easily involve security risks and functional errors, especially for complex services composed of different blockchains. To help developers focus on their business model instead of diving into the blockchain architecture heterogeneity, we propose a framework to enable analysis and comparison of composed services before deployment. This is achieved through the intensive use of model-based engineering allowing reasoning on the model before generating concrete deployment artifacts, especially for the safe orchestration of contract calling transactions