![](bgb.png)
DSL development process. As they participate in
the creation of the iteration planning, they are aware
about what user stories have been already accom-
plished, what is being addressed and when user stories
are planned to be finished. This situation improves the
relationship between end-users and developers: end-
users know exactly what to expect from developers
and they do not create themselves false expectations
that lead to future disappointments.
We should remark that these facts are not thor-
oughly validated as we have detected them during the
first iteration planning. In future work, we plan to
carry out more iterations to support these findings and
also to asses the complete process. For example, ask-
ing end-users about their opinions regarding the diffi-
culties found, the time they invested and the support
to react against their changing needs.
In summary, the benefits observed up now show
promising results of the use of good practices from
agile methods in DSL development to involve end-
users.
7 CONCLUSIONS
This research work proposes an agile DSL develop-
ment process that adopts a set of practices from agile
methods, with the main goal of improving end-users
involvement in DSL development. The agile practices
included are: 1) an iterative cycle, which addresses
only a set of end-users’ requests each iteration; 2) a
requirements specification activity based on the spec-
ification of user stories and acceptance tests, which
ensures that end-users communicate their ongoing re-
quirements in each iteration; and 3) an iteration plan-
ning step based on priorities and scenarios, which en-
sures that end-users express their ongoing priorities
and expectations. Thanks to these agile practices, a
better involvement of end-users in DSLs development
is expected as the preliminary results show.
We must remark that end-users involvement sup-
poses an overloading for some of them: they do not
appreciate the direct benefits or they are only inter-
ested in the finished DSL.This fact highlights the ne-
cessity of an agile DSL development process, which
is our main goal.
As future work, we will detail the stages not in-
cluded in this paper: Decision, Implementation and
Testing. Our goal is to clearly define each stage, se-
lecting the agile practices that improve end-user in-
volvement. Simultaneously, we will continue with the
development of the DSL for genetic disease diagnosis
in order to observe the practical benefits. Addition-
ally, geneticists from the SME will test the final DSL
with different disease diagnosis in order to assess the
completeness of the DSL developed.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank IMEGEN for all
these years of collaboration, providing both useful
genetic knowledge and a real environment for re-
search, and also GEMBiosoft, especially to Dr. Ana
M. Levin, for its support in the development of
this paper. This work has been developed with the
support of MICINN under the FPU grant AP2009-
1895, the project PROS-Req (TIN2010-19130-C02-
02), and co-financed with ERDF.
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