A Rapid Review Regarding the Concept of Legal Requirements in Requirements Engineering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Ruohonen, Jukka
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ruohonen, Jukka
author_facet Ruohonen, Jukka
contents Out of a personal puzzlement, recent peer review comments, and demonstrable confusion in the existing literature, the paper presents a rapid review of the concept of legal requirements (LRs) in requirements engineering (RE) research. According to reviewing results, a normative understanding of LRs has often been present, although proper definitions and conceptual operationalizations are lacking. Some papers also see LRs as functional and others as non-functional requirements. Legal requirements are often characterized as being vague and complex, requiring a lot of effort to elicit, implement, and validate. These characterizations supposedly correlate with knowledge gaps among requirements engineers. LRs are also seen to often change and overlap. They may be also prioritized. According to the literature, they seem to be also reluctantly implemented, often providing only a minimal baseline for other requirements. With these and other observations, the review raises critical arguments about apparent knowledge gaps, including a lack of empirical evidence backing the observations and enduring conceptual confusion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_06012
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Rapid Review Regarding the Concept of Legal Requirements in Requirements Engineering
Ruohonen, Jukka
Software Engineering
Out of a personal puzzlement, recent peer review comments, and demonstrable confusion in the existing literature, the paper presents a rapid review of the concept of legal requirements (LRs) in requirements engineering (RE) research. According to reviewing results, a normative understanding of LRs has often been present, although proper definitions and conceptual operationalizations are lacking. Some papers also see LRs as functional and others as non-functional requirements. Legal requirements are often characterized as being vague and complex, requiring a lot of effort to elicit, implement, and validate. These characterizations supposedly correlate with knowledge gaps among requirements engineers. LRs are also seen to often change and overlap. They may be also prioritized. According to the literature, they seem to be also reluctantly implemented, often providing only a minimal baseline for other requirements. With these and other observations, the review raises critical arguments about apparent knowledge gaps, including a lack of empirical evidence backing the observations and enduring conceptual confusion.
title A Rapid Review Regarding the Concept of Legal Requirements in Requirements Engineering
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06012