Workshop Overview

RELAW 2017 has an extended deadline of Tuesday, June 20th, 2017.

The tremendous growth of the software industry rapidly outpaced the regulatory processes intended to govern it. Laws and regulations impose compliance challenges for the requirements engineers seeking to build or maintain information systems, including: balancing privacy and security, patient medical records, corporate governance, and ambiguity stemming from evolving regulations, technologies, and societies. Regulators, lawyers, engineers, and academics must address these challenges through a shared pursuit to understand the historical, social, and economic impact of laws and regulations on emerging and existing technology. Importantly, these challenges are expensive, continuing, and rapidly changing. Regulatory compliance must be maintained, monitored, and measured throughout the life of regulated information systems.

The tenth RELAW workshop is a multi-disciplinary, one-day workshop that will bring together practitioners and researchers from two domains: Requirements Engineering and Law. Participants from government, industry, and academic sectors investigate challenges to ensure that information systems comply with policies and laws. The workshop will examine critical compliance concerns, including the processes for identifying relevant policies, laws, and jurisdictions; aligning system requirements with laws and regulations; managing changes in requirements or in the law; and demonstrating regulatory compliance through evidence-based mechanisms such as documentation, testing, and certification, even in the presence of uncertainty.

Authors may submit papers in two general categories:

• Research/Experience papers (10 pages max.)
• Vision papers (6 pages)

Short Papers in each category (4 pages) will also be allowed. More detailed information is available on our Call for Papers.

Theme: Simplicity and Complementarity in Legal Requirements

The RELAW workshop fosters discussion related to requirements engineering resulting from the need to build software systems in compliance with laws, regulations, and policy documents. The theme for this year is "Simplicity and Complementarity in Legal Requirements." This theme complements the theme for the main conference and encourages researchers to focus on simplifying the unfortunately complex process of aligning system requirements, stakeholder desires, and regulatory obligations. Laws, regulations, and policy documents need not conflict with successful software requirements; they should complement one another. How can requirements engineers simplify this process? What tools, techniques, and methods support a complementary approach to regulatory compliance for software systems? RELAW will bring together researchers from auditing, law, policy, software, and requirements engineering.

The objectives of this workshop include but are not limited to:

• Identifying and managing sources of uncertainty in regulatory compliance;
• Standardizing vocabulary, terms and modeling concepts from multiple disciplines;
• Developing measures or metrics to evaluate the return on investment of models, methods, tools, or techniques that improve requirements compliance;
• Developing methods for monitoring regulatory compliance requirements;
• Improving communication between and legal- or policy- oriented stakeholders and requirements engineers; and
• Identifying unsolved research and industry challenges and validation objectives for proposed solutions.

Attendance and Format

The workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers from auditing, accounting, law, software and requirements engineering. This workshop is open to the public. The workshop format will consist of presentations of papers and breakout sessions.

Best Paper Award

For the third time in RELAW's history, we plan to award a Best Paper award as a result of the review process. This award will be announced at the workshop during the summary discussion.

Colophon

The header image of Lisbon's Ponte 25 de Abril is remixed with permission from Michaela Loheit, and the original can be found on Flickr.