The objective of the workshop is to foster the discussion related to requirements engineering triggered by any legal regulation or law. For the enrichment of information systems with requirements derived from the regulations needed, a formalization of said is necessary and is resolved by interpretation, focused discussion, negotiation and reconciliation on the part of professionals with diverse viewpoints: business managers, engineers, lawyers and regulators. This means an active and continuous process: “Governance in Motion”.

Today’s rapidly changing environment which is accompanied by remarkable technology innovation and presupposes easy and quick access to information, new communication models, and increasing dependence on collaboration and cooperation motivates the discussion further on. Additionally this environment presents new challenges in trustworthy computing, regulatory compliance, and highly flexible business processes with traceability and accountability that require new and enhanced concepts, frameworks and tools for business and software engineering. The single organization will need to actively steer and determine its organizational structures and processes on a permanent basis to ensure the attainment of it’s strategy and targets. Compliance to legal regulations is part of the organization’s governance and requirements incorporated in law need to be addressed in business and information technology (IT).

The fourth RELAW workshop is a multi-disciplinary, one-day workshop that brings 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 probe important issues, including the processes for identifying relevant policies, laws and jurisdictions, aligning laws with system requirements, managing requirements and changes in the law and demonstrating how systems comply with relevant laws through evidence-based mechanisms such as documentation, testing and certification. For the first time since the workshop’s inception, RELAW will include a separate track from the requirements engineering research and industry papers to include submissions from law scholars to address emerging IT challenges in today’s regulatory environment.

Attendance, Format and Outcomes

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. The goals of this workshop include, but are not limited to:
Standardizing vocabulary and terms from multiple disciplines;
Refining objectives and identifying unsolved industry and research problems;
Finding agreement on validation objectives for proposed solutions; and
Modeling concepts for highly flexible processes and their traceability.