Open-Source Development Tools for Domain-Specific Modeling: Results from a Systematic Literature Review

Domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) are key to empowering organizational experts in interacting with business information systems. For this task, developing DSMLs based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become a popular option. However, a number of design decisions must be considered when developing UML-based DSMLs. In this paper, we extend a systematic literature review (SLR) to cover decisions with respect to model-driven development (MDD) tooling. We extract tooling information from the selected SLR papers and classify these software tools supporting DSML development. Using this classification, we report on usage frequencies for MDD-based tools as well as on their corresponding open-and closed-source license models. Results indicate that closed-source tools are mostly employed as editors for the language model and the diagrammatic syntax of a DSML only. For DSML development aspects other than these, primarily open-source tools are utilized (e.g., for constraint evaluation, model transformation).