Towards the Use of Software Requirement Patterns for Legal Requirements

Abstract

Laws and regulations play an increasingly important role for requirements engineering and system development. The challenge of interpreting the law to elicit legal requirements for a novel application calls for legal expertise. In this paper, we investigate if the effort of compiling a list of legal software requirements can be reduced by reusing recurring legal requirements. Therefore, we collected legal requirements that are stable concerning changes due to their origin in fundamental, higher-ranked laws, and derived software requirement patterns from them. This paper contributes by presenting those software requirement patterns consisting of the name, the goal and the pre-defined requirement template. We argue that under certain circumstances they can be used as a lightweight approach to specify legal requirements in system development projects and hence reduce the need for legal advice.

Keywords: Software Requirement Patterns, Requirements Reuse, Legal Requirements, Laws, Regulations