Enabling the Collaborative Definition of DSMLs?

Abstract. Software development processes are collaborative in nature. Neglect-ing 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 de-signed to carry out the tasks of a particular domain. While end-users are actually the experts of the domain for which a DSML is developed, their participation in the DSML specification process is still rather limited nowadays. In this paper we propose a more community-aware language development process by enabling the active participation of all community members (both developers and end-users of the DSML) from the very beginning. Our proposal is based on a DSML itself, called Collaboro, which allows representing change proposals on the DSML de-sign and discussing (and tracing back) possible solutions, comments and deci-sions arisen during the collaboration.