Legal Requirements, Compliance and Practice: An Industry Case Study in Accessibility

U.S. laws and regulations are designed to support broad societal goals, such as accessibility, privacy and safety. To demonstrate that a product complies with these goals, businesses need to identify and refine legal requirements into product requirements and integrate the product requirements into their ongoing product design and testing processes. We report on an industry case study in which product requirements were specified to comply with Section 508 of the U.S. Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998. This study sought to identify: limitations in existing requirementsacquisition methods; compliance gaps between previously specified product requirements and Section 508 of the WIA; and additional sources of knowledge that are necessary to refine legal requirements into product requirements to comply with the law. Our study reveals the need for a community of practice and generalizable techniques that can reduce ambiguity, complexity and redundancy in legal and product requirements ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: RE
• Authors: Travis D. Breaux, Annie I. Antón, Kent Boucher, Merlin Dorfman
• Keywords: Legal Requirements, Product Requirements, RE 2008, Section 508, Software Engineering