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

普适和分布式计算允许工程师在第三方组件、平台和基于云的服务中重复使用软件，从而缩短了开发时间。因此，该软件受到多项政策和法规的约束，这些政策和法规对这些复杂系统的行为施加了法律要求。随着开发商推出新的产品功能，进入跨越地缘政治边界的新市场，或者当现有法律发生变化或新法律出台时，法律要求给系统设计带来了进化压力。作为回应，软件工程师必须将法律要求与他们的系统设计协调起来，以确保他们的软件符合政策和法律；当在没有现有法律的情况下发生创新时，这是一个更具挑战性的问题。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)开发一套启发式和半正式的、特定于领域的语言，以确定需求覆盖范围；(2)经验地衡量来自不同司法管辖区的政策和法规之间的差距，这些差距指示了需求的权衡、趋势和由于需求变化而造成的潜在中断；以及(3)使开发人员能够基于更改覆盖的模型来合理化和选择可选的需求演化。成果包括解释和预测跨司法管辖区的需求演变的新理论，以及监管机构、法律专业人员和软件工程师可以用来减轻响应全球不断变化的监管格局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、信息检索和人体实验，旨在加深我们对专业人员如何表达和解释需求，以及他们如何在存在歧义和冲突的业务和监管目标的情况下协调相互冲突的需求的理解。除了培训和教育，这项研究的更广泛影响旨在使监管目标与软件系统协调一致，让历史上分开工作的软件工程和法律专业参与进来，并向政策制定者和立法者通报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.