Evaluating Legal Implementation Readiness Decision-Making
Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions(2015)
Abstract
Software systems are increasingly regulated. Software engineers therefore must determine which requirements have met or exceeded their legal obligations and which requirements have not. Requirements that have met or exceeded their legal obligations are legally implementation ready, whereas requirements that have not met or exceeded their legal obligations need further refinement. In this paper, we examine how software engineers make these determinations using a multi-case study with three cases. Each case involves assessment of requirements for an electronic health record system that must comply with the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and is measured against the evaluations of HIPAA compliance subject matter experts. Our first case examines how individual graduate-level software engineering students assess whether the requirements met or exceeded their HIPAA obligations. Our second case replicates the findings from our first case using a different set of participants. Our third case examines how graduate-level software engineering students assess requirements using the Wideband Delphi approach to deriving consensus in groups. Our findings suggest that the average graduate-level software engineering student is ill-prepared to write legally compliant software with any confidence and that domain experts are an absolute necessity.
MoreTranslated text
Key words
legal implementation readiness,legal requirements,regulatory compliance software engineering,requirements engineering,software engineering,software systems,law
AI Read Science
Must-Reading Tree
Example
![](https://originalfileserver.aminer.cn/sys/aminer/pubs/mrt_preview.jpeg)
Generate MRT to find the research sequence of this paper
Chat Paper
Summary is being generated by the instructions you defined