An approach for the systematic development of domain-specific languages

Building tailored software systems for a particular application domain is a complex task. For this reason, domain-specific languages (DSLs) receive a constantly growing attention in recent years. So far the main focus of DSL research is on case studies and experience reports for the development of individual DSLs, design ap-proaches and implementation techniques for DSLs, and the integration of DSLs with other software development approaches on a technical level. In this paper, we identify and describe the different activities that we conduct when engineering a DSL, and describe how these activities can be combined in order to define a tailored DSL engineering process. Our research results are based on the experiences we gained from multiple different DSL development projects and prototyping experiments.