Notation-driven vs metamodel-driven development of domain-specific modeling languages

Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) enable domain experts to represent their knowledge through their own domain-specific notations. The Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) community proposes a metamodel-driven approach for the production of tools implementing said DSMLs, i.e. one has to first devise the metamodel of a domain and then its notation. In an industrial context, the adoption by domain experts of modeling tools is a challenging issue. EADS as a major aircraft manufacturer faces this problem with experts from multiple fields. In this paper we argue that a notation-based approach, i.e. first designing the notation and then automatically generating the domain metamodel, would yield notations closer to experts' expectations; thus maximizing the adoption rate of the modeling tools. In order to test this hypothesis, we devised an empirical study comparing such a notation-driven approach to the metamodel-driven approach. We present in this paper the results and conclusions of this study.