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.