Improving End-User Productivity in Measurement Systems with a Domain-Specific (Modeling) Language Sequencer

Software development is a demanding process, since it involves different parties to perform a desired task. The same case applies to the development of measurement systems – measurement system producers often provide interfaces to their products, after which the customers’ programming engineers use them to build software according to the instructions and requirements of domain experts from the field of data acquisition. Until recently, the customers of the measurement system DEWESoft were building measuring applications, using prefabricated DCOM objects. However, a significant amount of interaction between customers’ programming engineers and measurement system producers is necessary to use DCOM objects. Therefore, a domain-specific language and domain-specific modeling language have been developed to enable domain experts to program or model their own measurement procedures without interacting with programming engineers. In this paper, experiences gained during the shift from using the DEWESoft product as a programming library to domain-specific (modeling) language are provided together with the details of a Sequencer, a domain-specific (modeling) language for the construction of measurement procedures.