🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the challenges posed by the proliferation, complexity, and expanding scope of regulatory requirements in software engineering, which hinder their systematic integration into development processes. To tackle this issue, the paper proposes a viewpoint-centered, artifact-based approach to regulatory requirements engineering. The approach innovatively integrates viewpoint analysis with artifact modeling to develop the AM4RRE (Artifact Modeling for Regulatory Requirements Engineering) framework, which facilitates cross-functional collaboration and ensures consistency in compliance-driven design. Preliminary validation demonstrates that AM4RRE effectively bridges the gap between organizational regulatory processes and software development practices, enabling a shift from ad hoc compliance responses toward systematic integration. This foundational work paves the way for further empirical investigation into scalable and sustainable regulatory compliance in software engineering.
📝 Abstract
Processing regulations and resulting requirements to achieve regulatory compliance in software engineering (SE) is a developing challenge due to the continuously growing amount, complexity, and expanding scope of regulations. Despite the growing amount of newly suggested regulatory requirements engineering (RE) approaches by the research community, industry remains under pressure to assure their integration into their RE and overall software development life cycle (SDLC) practices to facilitate a seamless and legally valid compliance by design. As of today, we still have limited empirical understanding of how this can be achieved. Such integration should avoid additional burdens and address the demands of legal knowledge intensity, cross-functional communication and consistency between different involved viewpoints. Intermediary results of this doctoral study showed that regulatory RE has peculiarities distinguishing it from the engineering of other requirements. Oftentimes, organizations establish standalone regulatory RE processes on the organizational level. However, software development teams usually approach compliance by design in an ad-hoc manner, rather than in a systematic way. Among other, because of the complexity of the coordination between the involved viewpoints. The goal of this paper is to report and get feedback about the synthesis and future evaluation of our Artefact Model for Regulatory Requirements Engineering (AM4RRE) for a integrated compliance by design. We hope this paper will spark discussions about regulatory RE and help us refine plans for the final stage of the doctoral study.