CAREER:Software Requirements Evolution in a Multi-Jurisdictional Socio-Technical Ecosystem

普适和分布式计算通过允许工程师在第三方组件、平台和基于云的服务中重用软件来缩短开发时间。因此，该软件受多个政策和法规的约束，这些政策和法规对这些复杂系统的行为施加了法律的要求。随着开发人员推出新的产品功能，进入跨越地理政治边界的新市场，或者当现有的法律发生变化或新的法律被创建时，法律的要求对系统设计产生了进化压力。作为回应，软件工程师必须协调法律的要求与他们的系统设计，以确保他们的软件符合政策和法律;当创新发生在缺乏现有法律的情况下，这个问题更具挑战性。本研究旨在通过分析管理软件的法规语料库来解决这个问题：（1）为了确定需求覆盖范围，开发一套用于表达和推理法律的需求所需的语言学和半正式的、特定于领域的语言;（2）从经验上衡量来自不同司法管辖区的政策和法规之间的差距，这些政策和法规表明需求权衡、趋势和由于需求变化而造成的潜在中断;（3）使开发人员能够根据不断变化的覆盖范围模型合理化和选择替代需求演进。这些成果包括解释和预测各司法管辖区需求演变的新理论，以及监管机构、法律的专业人员和软件工程师可以用来减轻应对全球不断变化的监管环境的负担的工具和技术。这些结果将使用混合方法研究进行评估，该研究结合了正式方法，信息检索和人类受试者实验，旨在进一步了解专业人士如何表达和解释要求，以及他们如何在存在模糊性和冲突的业务和监管目标的情况下调和冲突的要求。除了培训和教育，这项研究的更广泛的影响，旨在协调监管目标与软件系统，从事软件工程和法律的专业，在历史上分开工作，并告知政策和立法者有关法规对软件设计和开发的影响。

Pervasive and distributed computing decreases development time by allowing engineers to reuse software in third-party components, platforms and cloud-based services. Consequently, this software is subject to multiple policies and regulations that impose legal requirements on the behavior of these complex systems. Legal requirements create evolutionary pressure on system design as developers roll out new product features, enter new markets that cross geo-political boundaries, or when existing laws change or new laws are created. In response, software engineers must reconcile legal requirements with their system design to ensure their software complies with policy and law; a problem even more challenging when innovation occurs in the absence of existing law.This research aims to address this problem by analyzing corpora of regulations that govern software: (1) to develop a set of heuristics and semi-formal, domain-specific languages needed to express and reason about legal requirements for the purpose of determining requirements coverage; (2) to empirically measure gaps among policies and regulations from different jurisdictions that indicate requirements trade-offs, trends and potential disruptions due to changing requirements; and (3) to enable developers to rationalize and select alternate requirements evolutions based on models of changing coverage. The outcomes include new theory to explain and predict requirements evolution across jurisdictions, and tools and techniques that regulators, legal professionals and software engineers can use to reduce the burden of responding to a globally evolving regulatory landscape. These outcomes will be evaluated using mixed-methods research that combines formal methods, information retrieval and human subject experiments aimed at furthering our understanding of how professionals express and interpret requirements and how they reconcile conflicting requirements in the presence of ambiguity and conflicting business and regulatory goals. In addition to training and education, the broader impact of this research aims to harmonize regulatory goals with software systems, to engage the professions of software engineering and law that have historically worked separately, and to inform policy and lawmakers about the impact of regulations on software design and development.