Impediments to Regulatory Compliance of Requirements in Contractual Systems Engineering Projects

Abstract

Large-scale contractual systems engineering projects often need to comply with myriad government regulations and standards as part of contractual obligations. A key activity in the requirements engineering (RE) process for such a project is to demonstrate that all relevant requirements have been elicited from the regulatory documents and have been traced to the contract as well as to the target system components. That is, the requirements have met regulatory compliance. However, there are impediments to achieving this level of compliance due to such complexity factors as voluminous contract, large number of regulatory documents, and multiple domains of the system. Little empirical research has been conducted in the scientific community on identifying these impediments. Knowing these impediments is a driver for change in the solutions domain (i.e., creating improved or new methods, tools, processes, etc.) to deal with such impediments. Through a case study of an industrial RE project, we have identified a number of key impediments to achieving regulatory compliance in a large-scale, complex, systems engineering project. This project is an upgrade of a rail infrastructure system. The key contribution of the article is a number of hitherto uncovered impediments described in qualitative and quantitative terms. The article also describes an artefact model, depicting key artefacts and relationships involved in such a compliance project. This model was created from data gathered and observations made in this compliance project. In addition, the article describes emergent metrics on regulatory compliance of requirements that can possibly be used for estimating the effort needed to achieve regulatory compliance of system requirements.