NSF Award
2217573
Within the last decade, innovation in the field of Software Engineering has produced new consumer products and services that affect nearly every aspect of daily life. This innovation is made possible by the broad adoption of agile software-development methods that emphasize fast delivery of working software and a rapid, dynamic response to changing consumer needs. The culture of innovation encourages entrepreneurship and the deployment of novel, creative software to allow companies to quickly assume a position of market leadership. Due to the ubiquity and pervasiveness of software, however, innovation that produces software quickly, without attention to societal or ethical concerns, risks creating harm to the public. Laws and regulations are enacted to protect the public from such harm, and regulators and standards organizations serve to guide companies in how to comply with the law. The cost of innovation with weak accountability to law and society is high: while thousands of companies have been fined billions of dollars by government regulators for non-compliance, enforcement action addresses only a fraction of the potential wrongs. Regulators often lack the resources to investigate every company, and as a result, millions of users are affected by regulated technologies that are at risk of non-compliance. To date, the disciplines of law and software engineering have been largely siloed, and legal accountability is typically addressed late in the design process in an ad hoc manner after key design decisions have been made, and at a point where the cost to change those decisions is high. This project will break down this interdisciplinary barrier by discovering integrative methods that align legal and engineering considerations from both disciplines, allowing design teams to make trade-off decisions early in the design process. As laws and regulations protect the public from harm, these methods will accrue benefits to society by ensuring that individuals’ legal rights are protected by software in a transparent and observable manner. The project will also yield new courseware to support the training of law and engineering students, filling a void in both disciplines where this training presently does not exist, and it will inform public policy on the challenges and opportunities to demonstrate accountability to law and society.<br/><br/>This project will investigate new methods and tools to design software to be accountable to law and regulation. The method will leverage structured-argumentation theory to document and reconcile laws, regulations, legal precedents, and past enforcement actions with software requirements and architecture. The project will prototype novel tools to support enhanced, bidirectional collaboration and cross-functional teaming, including experiments to evaluate the efficacy of the methods and tools in producing legally accountable software in the data protection domain. The project will contribute to scientific knowledge in several ways: (1) the project will bridge theory from law, computer science, and psychology on cross-functional teaming with empirical evidence of legal and design thinking to produce (a) new structures to represent legal and design reasoning, and (b) new methods for eliciting, critiquing, and justifying to what extent design decisions satisfy legal requirements, while increasing subject matter expert knowledge across two domains in law and engineering; (2) new enhanced agile software-engineering methods, tools and metrics that support and measure how well these discussions are moving toward increasing legal accountability in design; and (3) new understanding about the extent to which design reasoning to increase legal accountability from a legal and design context is generalizable to other design contexts.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
