Rapid Prototyping for Domain-specific Languages - From Stakeholder Analyses to Modelling Tools

Abstract

Today, modelling is a widely acisecepted technique in Software Engineering (SE). Many problems can be expressed using general-purpose modelling languages such as the UML. For more specific problems, the definition of a specialised domain-specific language (DSL) may be required. The definition of a domainspecific language is a time-consuming task that requires knowledge in (modelling) language design, deep understanding of the domain and, to be useful and usable, user assistance and tool support. In this paper, we present an approach to derive a domain-specific language from the description of instances of the domain under consideration: Stakeholders describe model instances from which the metamodel (the DSL) and a suitable modelling tool are derived automatically. We describe a tool that we used to experiment with this approach, its current state and the future work.