Toward requirements-driven design of visual modeling languages

Abstract

The design of a visual modeling language demands for a large number of decisions to be taken, depending on the intended purposes of the language, the domain context, and the goals and requirements of different stakeholders who are the prospective users of the language. Methodical support for the design and choice of visual modeling languages plays an important role in Enterprise Modeling (EM), because EM strongly relies on the use of visual modeling languages for expressing human-understandable abstractions of complex domain contexts. However, existing research primarily discusses individual design aspects of visual modeling languages. The results of these studies partially overlap or contradict each other. The work at hand introduces an approach for systematically identifying and managing trade-offs between competing design recommendations, as well as for gaining an integrated multi-perspective view on requirements towards visual modeling languages. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by reconsidering some design decisions taken for the widely used Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) language.