Abstract

Laws and regulations are increasingly impacting the design and development of software systems, as legislations around the world attempt to control the impact of software on social and private life. Software systems need to be designed from the beginning in a law-aware fashion to ensure compliance with applicable laws. Moreover, they need to evolve over time as new laws pass and existing ones are amended. In this interdisciplinary field many challenges remain open. For any given norm, there are alternative ways to comply with it for a system-to-be. Moreover, revising some requirements or adding new ones can have an important impact on what norms apply. To complicate matters, there is a sizeable knowledge gap between technical and legal experts, and this hampers requirements analysts in dealing with the problem on their own. This thesis proposes to use conceptual models of law and requirements to help requirements engineers address these problems by answering questions such as ``Given this set of requirements, which norms are applicable?'', ``Which norms are complied with?'', ``What are the alternative ways I use to comply with a norm?''. The thesis proposes the Nomos 3 framework that includes a modeling language for law and requirements, reasoning support for Nomos 3 models, as well as a systematic process for establishing compliance. The proposed framework is evaluated by means of illustrative case studies, a scalability study for the reasoning mechanism, as well as other specific studies intended to assess the effectiveness of the proposed concepts, tools, and process.