Involving End-Users in the Design of a Domain-Specific Language for the Genetic Domain

The participation of end-users in software development ensures a better representation of their requirements in the resulting software product. With this aim, Domain-specific Languages (DSL) were proposed for abstracting the programming complexity of a domain and to provide an understandable tool for end-users. However, how end-users must be involved in the DSL development itself is also important, but it is not usually taken into account. As a solution, we propose a DSL development process for involving end-users; concretely, in this paper, we focus on their involvement during the design of the DSL syntax. For achieving this goal, we identify the decisions that developers must address to design the syntax, and we discuss how end-users can participate in those decisions. As a proof of concept, we apply the proposal to design the syntax of a DSL for genetic disease diagnosis software with the collaboration of geneticists and bioinformaticians from two SMEs.