Committee:

Dr. A. Anton (co-chair)
Dr. J. Doyle (co-chair)
Dr. L Williams
Dr. J. Earp
Peter Swire

Title: Reasoning About Legal Text Evolution for Regulatory Compliance in Software Systems

Abstract:
Laws and regulations govern organizations and the software systems that they use. Software engineers must understand these laws and regulations as they are constructing their systems to ensure regulatory compliance in software systems. As laws and regulations evolve over time, engineers must understand the impact on their systems and adapt their software accordingly.
Oftentimes, engineers have compressed timelines to address new requirements imposed by regulatory evolution due to compliance deadlines and time-to-market pressures. The approach that we propose herein helps engineers comply with evolving regulations. Our approach consists of three parts: (1) an Adaptability Framework for understanding how and why regulations evolve, and predict which areas of the regulation may change in the future; (2) cross-reference analysis for understanding the impact of cross-references have on software, as well as identifying the conflicts cross-references introduce; and (3) a methodology for modeling regulations using production rules for checking existing systems for compliance. We validated our approach using regulations from two domains: healthcare and finance. In addition, we present the findings of an empirical study in which we find that software practitioners are not well-equipped to understand the impact of compliance requirements on software.