Artifact model improves coordination between legal and software teams
Supporting Viewpoint Coordination for Compliance by Design with an Artifact Model for Regulatory Requirements Engineering
Software Engineering
Summary
Making sure software follows the law is complicated because legal experts and software creators see things differently. The authors propose a new way to bridge these differences using a special model called AM4RRE, which guides teams on how to work together better when deciding what the software must do to comply with regulations. This method was tested with software professionals and showed it helped them create requirements faster and with better quality. This approach aims to make legal rules clearer and easier to follow during software design.
What this means in practice
- •For software requirements engineers: Improve coordination with legal experts to create clearer regulatory requirements that support compliance by design.
- •For legal compliance teams: Use artifact-based templates to communicate legal rules effectively to software developers for better compliance implementation.
Authors
Oleksandr Kosenkov, Davide Fucci, Michael Unterkalmsteiner, Daniel Mendez
Abstract
Regulatory compliance has become an essential software requirement Legal demands for compliance by design CbD call for requirements engineering RE approaches that derive requirements and support compliance implementation in subsequent software engineering SE processes such as software design The complexity of the legal knowledge demanded in regulatory RE makes it important to involve legal experts and ensure the relevant specifications are valid and usable for them Regulatory requirements must support compliance implementation in software design However there is a lack of approaches bridging legal and SE viewpoints and interaction challenges between the two persist To address engineeringlegal coordination in specification of regulatory requirements we propose the Artifact Model for Regulatory Requirements Engineering AM4RRE operationalized through templates AM4RRE was positively evaluated by most of the 37 practitioners for coordination in regulatory RE and for supporting requirements quality Results from a quasiexperiment with 34 of them in 10 groups indicated that templateguided coordination was associated with on average shorter total specification time when executed first and higher requirements quality in most groups in which it varied Existing RE research and practice provide little attention and support for viewpoint coordination in regulatory RE for CbD Artifactoriented approaches such as AM4RRE have the potential to guide coordination in RE for better RE results and contribute to concretizing the role and contribution of RE to CbD