Oleksandr Kosenkov

Oleksandr Kosenkov, Konstantin Blaschke, Tony Gorschek et al.

There is a growing demand for software engineering education (SEE) for professionals because of the increasing demand, active evolution of the technological landscape, and changes in the skills required by the practice. Integrating requirements engineering (RE) courses into SEE curricula for professionals systematically and effectively is challenging. In particular, curricula for professionals have different demands, are more dynamic, and modular in nature. In this study, we report on our experience in the development of three SEE curricula for professionals and the integration of RE courses into such curricula. We suggest basic principles for such integration and describe the systematic approach focused on course content mapping that we have developed.

Oleksandr Kosenkov

Processing regulations and resulting requirements to achieve regulatory compliance in software engineering (SE) is a developing challenge due to the continuously growing amount, complexity, and expanding scope of regulations. Despite the growing amount of newly suggested regulatory requirements engineering (RE) approaches by the research community, industry remains under pressure to assure their integration into their RE and overall software development life cycle (SDLC) practices to facilitate a seamless and legally valid compliance by design. As of today, we still have limited empirical understanding of how this can be achieved. Such integration should avoid additional burdens and address the demands of legal knowledge intensity, cross-functional communication and consistency between different involved viewpoints. Intermediary results of this doctoral study showed that regulatory RE has peculiarities distinguishing it from the engineering of other requirements. Oftentimes, organizations establish standalone regulatory RE processes on the organizational level. However, software development teams usually approach compliance by design in an ad-hoc manner, rather than in a systematic way. Among other, because of the complexity of the coordination between the involved viewpoints. The goal of this paper is to report and get feedback about the synthesis and future evaluation of our Artefact Model for Regulatory Requirements Engineering (AM4RRE) for a integrated compliance by design. We hope this paper will spark discussions about regulatory RE and help us refine plans for the final stage of the doctoral study.

Oleksandr Kosenkov, Vadym Honcharenko, Abhinava Singh et al.

In recent decades, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) have been recognized as a means of meeting regulatory and user privacy requirements in software systems that process personal data. Despite substantial research efforts, support from regulators, contributions by large technology companies such as Google and Microsoft, and growing interest among software practitioners, the practical adoption of PETs remains limited. Existing research consistently identifies recurring challenges to PETs adoption in SE, such as technical complexity and insufficient training. Despite ongoing research efforts, these challenges largely remain unresolved in practice. In this industrial challenge paper, we apply a practical, requirements engineering (RE)-driven perspective to examine challenges to PET adoption across multiple stakeholder groups (PET developers, integrators, and adopters) as well as across different disciplinary perspectives (engineering, law, and business). We argue that RE can facilitate the adoption of PETs by systematically addressing each of the complementary engineering, business, and legal viewpoints on privacy. Neglecting challenges in any of these viewpoints (e.g., the impact of PETs on software architecture, their business implications, and their contribution to regulatory compliance) can increase the impediments or even lead to implementation failure. In practice, explicit specification of these viewpoints within RE can enable meaningful coordination among stakeholders to more effectively realize the benefits of PETs in software engineering.