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Software systems are increasingly expected to address a broad range of stakeholder values representing both personal and societal values as well as values ensconced as laws and regulations. Whereas laws and regulations must be fully addressed, other human values need to be carefully analyzed and prioritized within the context of candidate architectural designs. The majority of prior work has investigated requirements engineering techniques for either regulatory compliance or for human-values, we take an integrated approach which simultaneously considers laws and regulations as well as societal and personal human values throughout the system analysis, specification, and design process. We illustrate our approach through detailed examples drawn from a multi-drone system regulated by the USA Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and operating in a domain rich with human and societal values. We then discuss requirements engineering challenges and solutions unique to identifying analyzing, and prioritizing human, societal, and regulatory requirements, and ultimately for designing accountable software systems.
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Modeling, Analyzing and Communicating Regulatory Ambiguity: An Empirical study
Regulations outline high-level guidance or expectations for a profession or industry. Analyzing laws or regulations is one way a software developer would derive and document regulatory compliance requirements within their software design. However, ambiguities within regulations can make it challenging to define technical software design specifications for regulatory requirements. Further, due to the subjective nature of ambiguous phrasing within a law or regulation, the interpretation of the legal text can differ based on the interpreter’s perspective. Our study examines whether software developers can analyze regulatory ambiguities as a group using our modeling process and our online Ambiguity Heuristics Analysis Builder (AHAB) tool. Eleven participants formed three groups and modeled ambiguities within a regulation using our process and tool. Modeling regulatory ambiguity, while difficult for our participants, allowed them to communicate potential issues, ask meaningful questions, and deepen their knowledge of the regulation. Ambiguity modeling allows developers to articulate interpretation and compliance issues with the laws to other parties (i.e., lawyers) and document this requirement analysis step for future use. Documenting these intermediate steps is rarely highlighted in requirement analysis. However, it is useful to negotiate with regulators, avoid negligence, and show due diligence toward regulatory compliance. It can also lead to clarifying guidance software developers need to make better, more compliant choices during software design.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1938121
- PAR ID:
- 10521634
- Publisher / Repository:
- Workshop on Multi-disciplinary, Open, and RElevant Requirements Engineering, co-located with International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024). IEEE/ACM
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Proceeding:
- The DOI is not currently available.
