A Survey on Documenting and Using Design Rationale when Developing Domain-specific Modeling Languages

This document reports on the results of a survey which is part of a long-term research project conducted at the Institute for Information Systems and New Media at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna) and which targeted experts on domain-pecific modeling languages (DSMLs). We define a DSML as being a specialized modeling language tailored primarily for graphical modeling tasks in a particular application domain, supporting the model-driven development (MDD) of software systems for this domain. As a special kind of domain-specific languages (DSLs), DSMLs provide end users with at least one graphical or diagrammatic concrete syntax; in contrast to textual or form/table-based DSLs, for instance. We asked DSML experts identified via dedicated scientific venues (e.g. authors of published articles, program committee members of conferences, associate editors of journals) to take part in the survey. Venues included premier outlets for researchers and practitioners in the field of MDD and DSMLs, such as, the ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MoDELS) or the International Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM). With this survey, we collected expert opinions on different aspects of documenting and using design rationale when developing DSMLs. In the context of DSML development, design rationale is the reasoning and justification of decisions made when designing, creating, and using the core artifacts of a DSML (e.g. abstract and concrete syntax, behavior specification, metamodeling infrastructure, MDD tool chain).