Collaborative Research: DASS: Legal Accountability as Software Quality

在过去的十年中，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。敏捷软件开发方法强调工作软件的快速交付和对不断变化的用户需求的快速、动态的响应，这种创新是通过广泛采用敏捷软件开发方法实现的。创新文化鼓励企业家精神，鼓励采用新颖、有创意的软件，使公司能够迅速占据市场领导地位。然而，由于软件的无所不在和无处不在，快速生产软件的创新，而不考虑社会或伦理问题，有可能对公众造成伤害。制定法律法规是为了保护公众免受此类伤害，监管机构和标准组织负责指导公司如何遵守法律。对法律和社会问责不力的创新成本很高：尽管数千家公司因违规被政府监管机构处以数十亿美元的罚款，但执法行动只解决了潜在错误的一小部分。监管机构往往缺乏调查每家公司的资源，因此，数百万用户受到受监管技术的影响，这些技术有违规的风险。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殊的方式处理的，在做出关键的设计决策之后，在改变这些决策的成本很高的时候。该项目将通过发现将法律和工程考虑结合起来的综合方法来打破这种跨学科的障碍，允许设计团队在设计过程的早期做出权衡决策。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受到软件的保护，从而为社会带来利益。该项目还将制作新的课件，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此类培训的空白，并将为公共政策提供有关挑战和机遇的信息，以证明对法律和社会的责任。这个项目将研究新的方法和工具来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行行动与软件需求和体系结构。该项目将对新型工具进行原型设计，以支持增强的双向协作和跨职能团队，包括评估在数据保护领域生产具有法律责任的软件的方法和工具的功效的实验。该项目将在以下几个方面为科学知识作出贡献：(1)该项目将把法律、计算机科学和心理学的跨职能团队理论与法律和设计思维的经验证据结合起来，产生(a)代表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)新的增强的敏捷软件工程方法、工具和度量标准，这些方法、工具和度量标准支持并衡量这些讨论如何朝着增加设计中的法律责任的方向发展；(3)关于设计推理在法律和设计环境中增加法律责任的程度的新理解可以推广到其他设计环境。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识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.