Effort Used to Create Domain-Specific Modeling Languages with MetaEdit+: 10 days
Proceedings of ACM Models conference, doi:10.1145/3239372.3239410
Abstract
Domain-specific modeling languages and generators have been shown to significantly improve the productivity and quality of system and software development. These benefits are typically reported without explaining the size of the initial investment in creating the languages, generators and related tooling. We compare the investment needed across ten cases, in two different ways, focusing on the effort to develop a complete modeling solution for a particular domain with the MetaEdit+ tool. Firstly, we use a case study research method to obtain detailed data on the development effort of implementing two realistically-sized domain-specific modeling solutions. Secondly, we review eight publicly available cases from various companies to obtain data from industry experiences with the same tool, and compare them with the results from our case studies. Both the case studies and the industry reports indicate that, for this tool, investment in creating domain-specific modeling support is modest: ranging from 3 to 15 man-days with an average of 10 days.
