Designing Law-Compliant Software Requirements

New laws, such as HIPAA and SOX, are increasingly impacting the design of software systems, as business organisations strive to comply. This paper studies the problem of generating a set of requirements for a new system which comply with a given law. Specifically, the paper proposes a systematic process for generating law-compliant requirements by using a taxonomy of legal concepts and a set of primitives to describe stakeholders and their strategic goals. Given a model of law and a model of stakeholders goals, legal alternatives are identified and explored. Strategic goals that can realise legal prescriptions are systematically analysed, and alternative ways of fulfilling a law are evaluated. The approach is demonstrated by means of a case study. This work is part of the Nomos framework, intended to support the design of law-compliant requirements models.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ER
• Authors: Alberto Siena, John Mylopoulos, Anna Perini, Angelo Susi
• Keywords: ER 2009, Law-compliant Requirements, Programming Languages, Stakeholders Goals, Strategic Goals