Domain-Specific Language domain analysis and evaluation: a systematic literature review

In order to successfully implement Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), it is needed to systematically define and to support its development process; namely its Evaluation and the Domain Analysis phase. For that purpose, the studies were systematically selected from the most relevant venues that focus on the implementation of DSLs, in order to get insight if and how these development phases were performed. The special focus was given to the human-machine DSLs (excluding the machine-machine languages), the involvement of its end-users in the development process and the evaluation of DSLs usability, i.e. quality in use of DSLs. Preliminary results give us a notion that there is increased the state of practice of performing the evaluation of the DSLs, mostly including usability concerns, at least after its implementation. Generally, the quality of the reviewed studies was high. On another hand, rarely the assessments are done during domain analysis, which in general is not reporting inclusion of end-users or consideration of different use-cases, although the majority of studies refer to target non-programmers and to contribute easy in use. We did collect the valuable body of primary studies that are giving us answers to our research questions, however, to raise the credibility of the conclusions we should extend the analysis to other venues. Also, as we get insights into the categorization of practices we could specify more concretely answers that would give us means to perform more detailed meta-analysis