Are Domain-Specific Models Easier to Maintain Than UML Models?

Although domain-specific modeling (DSM) languages have been adopted in industries such as telecommunications and insurance, they haven't yet gained wide acceptance in practice. This is because the claims of increased productivity and ease of understanding haven't yet been verified by independent studies. To address this concern, we examined a DSM language's performance for maintenance tasks. Maintenance in software-intensive systems is critical because software often continuously evolves during development as well as after delivery, to meet users' ever-changing needs. So, maintenance performance significantly impacts software development productivity.Experimental results show that maintenance can be significantly easier and faster with a DSM language than with a general- purpose modeling language.