Collaborative Research: DASS: Legal Accountability as Software Quality

在过去的十年里，软件工程领域的创新产生了新的消费产品和服务，几乎影响到日常生活的方方面面。这一创新是由于敏捷软件开发方法的广泛采用，这些方法强调快速交付工作软件，并对不断变化的消费者需求做出快速、动态的反应。创新文化鼓励创业精神和新奇、有创意的软件的部署，使公司能够迅速占据市场领先地位。然而，由于软件的无处不在和无处不在，快速生产软件的创新如果不关注社会或伦理问题，就有可能对公众造成伤害。制定法律和法规是为了保护公众免受这种伤害，监管机构和标准组织负责指导公司如何遵守法律。对法律和社会的问责性较弱的创新成本很高：尽管数千家公司因违规被政府监管机构罚款数十亿美元，但执法行动只解决了一小部分潜在的错误。监管机构往往缺乏调查每家公司的资源，因此，数百万用户受到受到监管的技术的影响，这些技术存在违规风险。到目前为止，法律和软件工程的学科在很大程度上是孤立的，法律责任通常是在设计过程的后期以一种特别的方式处理的，在做出关键的设计决策之后，在更改这些决策的成本很高的时候。该项目将通过发现使两个学科的法律和工程考虑因素保持一致的综合方法来打破这种跨学科障碍，使设计团队能够在设计过程的早期做出权衡决定。由于法律和法规保护公众免受伤害，这些方法将通过确保个人的合法权利以透明和可观察的方式通过软件得到保护，从而为社会带来好处。该项目还将制作新的课程，以支持法律和工程专业学生的培训，填补这两个学科目前没有这种培训的空白，并将向公共政策提供信息，说明向法律和社会负责的挑战和机会。该项目将探索新的方法和工具，以设计对法律和法规负责的软件。该方法将利用结构化论证理论来记录和协调法律、法规、法律先例和过去的执法行动与软件需求和体系结构。该项目将制作新工具的原型，以支持增强的双向协作和跨职能团队，包括评估这些方法和工具在数据保护领域生产法律责任软件方面的有效性的实验。该项目将以几种方式为科学知识做出贡献：(1)该项目将从法学、计算机科学和心理学的交叉职能与法律和设计思维的经验证据相结合的理论之间架起桥梁，以产生(A)表示法律和设计推理的新结构，以及(B)引出、批评和证明设计决策在多大程度上满足法律要求的新方法，同时增加法律和工程两个领域的主题专家知识；(2)新的增强型敏捷软件工程方法、工具和度量，支持和衡量这些讨论在设计中如何朝着增加法律责任的方向发展；以及(3)对从法律和设计环境中增加法律责任的设计推理在多大程度上可以推广到其他设计环境的新理解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Within the last decade, innovation in the field of Software Engineering has produced new consumer products and services that affect nearly every aspect of daily life. This innovation is made possible by the broad adoption of agile software-development methods that emphasize fast delivery of working software and a rapid, dynamic response to changing consumer needs. The culture of innovation encourages entrepreneurship and the deployment of novel, creative software to allow companies to quickly assume a position of market leadership. Due to the ubiquity and pervasiveness of software, however, innovation that produces software quickly, without attention to societal or ethical concerns, risks creating harm to the public. Laws and regulations are enacted to protect the public from such harm, and regulators and standards organizations serve to guide companies in how to comply with the law. The cost of innovation with weak accountability to law and society is high: while thousands of companies have been fined billions of dollars by government regulators for non-compliance, enforcement action addresses only a fraction of the potential wrongs. Regulators often lack the resources to investigate every company, and as a result, millions of users are affected by regulated technologies that are at risk of non-compliance. To date, the disciplines of law and software engineering have been largely siloed, and legal accountability is typically addressed late in the design process in an ad hoc manner after key design decisions have been made, and at a point where the cost to change those decisions is high. This project will break down this interdisciplinary barrier by discovering integrative methods that align legal and engineering considerations from both disciplines, allowing design teams to make trade-off decisions early in the design process. As laws and regulations protect the public from harm, these methods will accrue benefits to society by ensuring that individuals’ legal rights are protected by software in a transparent and observable manner. The project will also yield new courseware to support the training of law and engineering students, filling a void in both disciplines where this training presently does not exist, and it will inform public policy on the challenges and opportunities to demonstrate accountability to law and society.This project will investigate new methods and tools to design software to be accountable to law and regulation. The method will leverage structured-argumentation theory to document and reconcile laws, regulations, legal precedents, and past enforcement actions with software requirements and architecture. The project will prototype novel tools to support enhanced, bidirectional collaboration and cross-functional teaming, including experiments to evaluate the efficacy of the methods and tools in producing legally accountable software in the data protection domain. The project will contribute to scientific knowledge in several ways: (1) the project will bridge theory from law, computer science, and psychology on cross-functional teaming with empirical evidence of legal and design thinking to produce (a) new structures to represent legal and design reasoning, and (b) new methods for eliciting, critiquing, and justifying to what extent design decisions satisfy legal requirements, while increasing subject matter expert knowledge across two domains in law and engineering; (2) new enhanced agile software-engineering methods, tools and metrics that support and measure how well these discussions are moving toward increasing legal accountability in design; and (3) new understanding about the extent to which design reasoning to increase legal accountability from a legal and design context is generalizable to other design contexts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.