Usability Evaluation of Domain-Specific Languages: A Systematic Literature Review Ildevana Poltronieri Rodrigues (&) ,Márcia de Borba Campos, and Avelino F. Zorzo PUCRS - Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil ildevana.rodrigues@acad.pucrs.br, {marcia.campos,avelino.zorzo}@pucrs.br Abstract. Software developers have always been concerned with the quality of the products they produce. Although software engineers use new methods to evaluate the quality of their software, there are still some concerns in several of the methods they use when developing software, for example, when using Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). One of the main goals of DSLs is to ease the work of developers in different areas. However, to achieve this goal it is necessary to provide an evaluation of the usability of such languages. Although it is possible to find some experiments to evaluate such languages, usually this experiments are subjective and do not use techniques from the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) area. Therefore, this paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in which a discussion on the usability of DSLs is presented. This paper also presents a mapping to show how usability has been assessed by researchers in their work. Keywords: Human-Computer Interaction Á Domain-Specific Languages Á Systematic Literature Review Á Usability evaluation 1 Introduction The use of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) eases software development through the appropriate abstractions and notations [4, 12, 16]. Some studies [4, 5, 12, 15] show the importance of DSLs for increasing productivity when developing a system and also for information exchange among experts from a domain [20]. Furthermore, the use of DSLs may facilitate the understanding of programming code, write it faster, and make it less prone to include faults [13]. There are DSLs for several different domains, for example, robotics [9, 23], software architectures anomalies [1], games [11, 14, 29, 32] or performance testing [6–8]. Although their advantages, some studies [7, 18] show that DSLs usage is not widespread. Among the problems that may prevent their use is the lack of systematic approaches to validate DSLs, mainly regarding their quality of use, such as ef ficiency, ef ficacy and usage satisfaction [3]. Furthermore, it is dif ficult to identify or quantify usability problems in DSLs [13]. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 M. Kurosu (Ed.): HCI 2017, Part I, LNCS 10271, pp. 522–534, 2017. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-58071-5_39