Miguel Goulão

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are claimed to bring important productivity improvements to developers,
when compared to General-Purpose Languages (GPLs). The increased Usability is regarded as one of the key benefits of DSLs when compared to GPLs, and has an important impact on the achieved productivity of the DSL users. So, it is essential to build in good usability while developing the DSL. The purpose of this proposal is to contribute to the systematic activity of Software Language Engineering by focusing on the
issue of the Usability evaluation of DSLs. Usability evaluation is often skipped, relaxed, or at least omitted from papers reporting development of DSLs. We argue that a systematic approach based on User Interface experimental validation techniques should be used to assess the impact of new DSLs. For that purpose, we propose to merge common Usability evaluation processes with the DSL development process. In order to provide reliable metrics and tools we should reuse and identify good practices that exist in Human-Computer
Interaction community.

The usability of requirements engineering (RE) techniques has been recognised as a key factor for their successful adoption by industry. RE techniques must be accessible to stakeholders with different backgrounds, so they can be empowered to effectively and efficiently contribute to building successful systems. When selecting an appropriate requirements engineering technique for a given context, one should consider the usability supported by each of the candidate techniques. The first step towards achieving this goal is to gather the best evidence available on the usability of RE approaches by performing a systematic literature review, to answer one research question: How is the usability of requirements engineering techniques and tools addressed? We systematically review articles published in the Requirements Engineering Journal, one of the main sources for mature work in RE, to motivate a research roadmap to make RE approaches more accessible to stakeholders with different backgrounds.

A rapidly changing market leads to software systems with highly volatile requirements. In many cases, new demands in software can often be met by extending the functionality of systems already in operation. By modularizing volatile requirements that can be altered at the client’s initiative or according to market demands, we can build a stepping-stone for management of requirements change. The volatility must be managed in a way that reduces the time and costs associated with updating a system to meet the new requirements. In this chapter, we present an approach for handling volatile concerns during early life cycle software modeling. The key insight is that techniques for aspect-oriented software development can be applied to modularize volatility and to weave volatile concerns into the base software artifacts.