HybriDLUX

HybriDLUX (Hybrid Domain-specific Language User EXperience) is a three-year national research project on improving the ease-of-use of DSL and DSL-based software-development tooling in industry, funded by the Austrian research funding association (FFG) within the funding programme ICT of the Future (6th call 2017) of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT), contract #867535. Four partner organisations contribute to HybriDLUX: AVL List GmbH, EclipseSource Services Vienna, TU Wien and WU Vienna. The project started in the first quarter of 2019 and is a continuation of the successful exploratory project DLUX (FFG #855465, ICT of the Future, 4th call).

Overview

Adoption and proliferation of model-driven software development and domain-specific software languages in industry face significant barriers, despite promising reduced complexity, increased maintainability, and consolidation potential of complex industrial software systems. These benefits, however, do not realize in a complex industrial setting due to lacking ease-of-use of techniques and tools. In a prior exploratory project DLUX, we have identified, among others, two main obstacles for the adoption of model-driven software development and domain-specific software languages:

The lack of techniques allowing developers to use hybrid abstractions suitable to their work tasks. A hybrid modelling abstraction is a blend of two or more notations (textual/ textual, textual/ graphical, graphical/ graphical) and a blend of two or more views on a domain of application.
The lack of validation and verification techniques supporting detection and localization of software defects at the level of hybrid models.

Objectives

In HybriDLUX, we will develop novel techniques for hybrid collaborative modelling and model-level debugging. Particular challenges are maintaining consistency among hybrid abstractions (aka intra- and inter-model consistency) and supporting collaborative development. The resulting techniques will be empirically investigated regarding their ease-of-use properties and their impact on the adoption of model-driven software development and domain-specific software languages in an industrial setting, with a focus on automotive instrumentation and automative testing applications at AVL. Additions and enhancements to Open-Source software (e.g., Eclipse-based modeling and DSL tooling) will be made publicly available.

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