Towards Auditability Requirements Specification Using an Agent-Based Approach
This addresses the problem of ensuring transparency and auditability in public information systems for citizens and organizations, though it is incremental in applying existing transparency models to a specific methodology.
The paper tackles the lack of systematization in specifying auditability requirements for systems, proposing an agent-based approach integrated into the Tropos methodology, with empirical evaluation on distributing over 300,000 lawsuits in a Brazilian court.
Transparency is an important factor in democratic societies composed of characteristics such as accessibility, usability, informativeness, understandability and auditability. In this research we focus on auditability since it plays an important role for citizens that need to understand and audit public information. Although auditability has been a subject of discussion when designing systems, there is a lack of systematization in its specification. We propose an approach to systematically add auditability requirements specification during the goal-oriented agent-based Tropos methodology. We used the Transparency Softgoal Interdependency Graph that captures the different facets of transparency while considering their operationalization. An empirical evaluation was conducted through the design and implementation of LawDisTrA system that distributes lawsuits among judges in an appellate court. Experiments included the distribution of over 300,000 lawsuits at the Brazilian Superior Labor Court. We theorize that the presented approach for auditability provides adequate techniques to address the cross-organizational nature of transparency.