Towards an Experimental Framework for Measuring Usability of Model-Driven Tools

According to the Model-Driven Development (MDD) paradigm, analysts can substantially improve the software development process concentrating their efforts on a conceptual model, which can be transformed into code by means of transformation rules applied by a model compiler. However, MDD tools are not widely used in industry. One of the reasons for this poor adoption is the lack of usability of MDD tools. This paper presents a framework to evaluate the usability of such tools. The framework will be used as a basis for a family of experiments to get clear insights into the barriers to usability that prevent MDD tools from being widely adopted in industry