Law and the software development life cycle

The increasing demand of reliable software services and the dependability that our daily personal and professional life have on them is bringing significant changes in the domain of software service engineering. One of the most revolutionary is the introduction of regulations, repeating what in the past has concerned the product market. Regulations need to find a balance between the interests of several roles and reduce the inevitable tensions that would otherwise arise among them, as well as to defend the right of the weakest parties (normally the end users). There are multiple interests to balance: the interests of end users, the protection of intellectual property, a fair competition against other enterprises, just to name a few. While some of these requirements concern the structure and organization of the enterprise, some of them are fit to penetrate into the software development life cycle. This would serve multiple purposes: allow the enterprise to design services which already take the legal requirements into account; visually represent the requirements and their interaction with the functionality of the system; develop the software components using tools and methodologies that are able to deal with those requirements; define metrics to measure the degree to which such requirements are met; measure the impact of the requirements on the functionality of the service and on other parameters of the service (such as performance or storage occupation); verify and monitor whether the legal requirements are met; and, last but not least, to have an argument to be used in case of a complaint in a court or at a competent authority. Before being considered in the software service life cycle, legal requirements must undergo a preprocessing phase in which they are translated into some form which is compatible with the tools and methodologies proper of the software engineering, for instance being modelled into a formalism that makes them processable by a machine. There is a significant amount of interdisciplinary topics that need to be combined together to reach an integration between regulation and software life cycle. In particular, at least from three complementary perspectives are needed. One perspective requires the analysis of the provisions of the law, the extraction of the legal requirements classified according to the stakeholders affected, and the translation of those requirements into some formal model that can be processed using appropriate software tools. A second perspective requires a study of the legal requirements from the point of view of requirements engineering techniques, also defining metrics to measure them. The third concerns the models used in the various stages of software engineering (design, modeling, development, validation and testing), which need to be extended to accommodate the legal requirements in their formal representation. Only by putting together these perspectives a comprehensive approach to deal with legal requirements in software engineering is possible.