Best practices in practice for domain specific modeling

• Gerald Czech
• Peter Hamberger
• Michael Moser
• Josef Pichler
• Jürgen Schickmair

Model-driven software development comes in different forms ranging from standard-based approaches to domainspecific modeling (DSM). While standard-based approaches leverage existing language standards (e.g. UML), tooling, and even development processes, DSM requires the design, implementation, and test of domain-specific languages and tool support prior the actual software development. To tackle these DSM-specific challenges, best practices have been collected from various horizontal and vertical application domains and published in literature to guide the development and application of DSM solutions. In this paper we first present best practices from literature and discuss how best practices overlap, complement, or contradict each other. From a total of 126 best practices in seven papers, we compiled 80 unique best practices, from which 21 are identified in at least two papers. Second, we describe the development of a domainspecific language and tool support in the domain of electrical engineering. Tool support is integrated with Visual Studio and enables domain experts to develop software components for a .NET application by using the novel domain-specific language.  Third, we discuss the uniquely identified best practices together with additional best practices in the context of the presented DSM solution.