On Developing an Artifact-based Approach to Regulatory Requirements Engineering

TL;DR

This paper introduces an artifact-based model for regulatory requirements engineering (RE) that integrates legal and engineering perspectives, aiming to improve requirements elicitation and analysis in regulated domains.

Contribution

It presents the first artifact model (AM4RRE) for regulatory RE, combining legal concepts with requirements engineering to facilitate legal-technical coordination.

Findings

Artifact model (AM4RRE) provides a legal-RE conceptual foundation

Legal and engineering concepts can be integrated using artifact-centric RE

Initial validation shows feasibility of applying artifact-based approaches to legal requirements

Abstract

Context: Regulatory acts are a challenging source when eliciting, interpreting, and analyzing requirements. Requirements engineers often need to involve legal experts who, however, may often not be available. This raises the need for approaches to regulatory Requirements Engineering (RE) covering and integrating both legal and engineering perspectives. Problem: Regulatory RE approaches need to capture and reflect both the elementary concepts and relationships from a legal perspective and their seamless transition to concepts used to specify software requirements. No existing approach considers explicating and managing legal domain knowledge and engineering-legal coordination. Method: We conducted focus group sessions with legal researchers to identify the core challenges to establishing a regulatory RE approach. Based on our findings, we developed a candidate solution and conducted a first conceptual validation to assess its feasibility. Results: We introduce the first version of our Artifact Model for Regulatory Requirements Engineering (AM4RRE) and its conceptual foundation. It provides a blueprint for applying legal (modelling) concepts and well-established RE concepts. Our initial results suggest that artifact-centric RE can be applied to managing legal domain knowledge and engineering-legal coordination. Conclusions: The focus groups that served as a basis for building our model and the results from the expert validation both strengthen our confidence that we already provide a valuable basis for systematically integrating legal concepts into RE. This overcomes contemporary challenges to regulatory RE and serves as a basis for exposure to critical discussions in the community before continuing with the development of tool-supported extensions and large-scale empirical evaluations in practice.