The Quest for Better Languages: Usage Patterns to the Rescue

Software development processes are collaborative in nature. Neglecting the key role of end-users leads to software that does not satisfy their needs. This collaboration becomes specially important when creating Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs), which are (modeling) languages specifically designed to carry out the tasks of a particular domain. While end-users are the experts of the domain for which a DSML is developed, their contribution to the actual DSML design is, in most cases, still rather limited. This results in DSMLs that are difficult to use or that, in general, do not respond to the user needs. We argue that observing how a language is actually used in practice and deriving real usage patterns from that is the best approach to improve the language design to make it closer to what users would really like to have.