New IST Special Issue: Regulatory Compliance in Software Engineering

The engineering of software-intensive products and services is confronted more and more with the challenge of complying with a plethora of regulations emerging from different sources and affecting both engineering processes and product characteristics alike. Regulatory compliance in Software Engineering refers to the verifiable adherence to relevant regulatory artefacts ranging from obligatory (i.e. legally binding) laws to domain-specific standards such as safety and security standards. Adhering to those regulations is of utmost importance and, at the same time, challenges.

It is therefore a great pleasure to co-edit a new special issue in the Information and Software Technology (IST) Journal on Regulatory Compliance in Software Engineering. Together with Sallam Abualhaija and Michael Unterkalmsteiner, we cordially invite authors to present insights, experiences, innovations, and solutions in the study of regulatory compliance in Software Engineering.

We particularly invite submissions (also from interdisciplinary configurations of authors and domains such as LegalTech,  that address questions of high relevance to the engineering of software-intensive products and services. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Checking compliance of software artefacts against regulations
• Dealing with changes of software engineering artefacts as well as regulations and how to ensure compliance throughout those changes
• Traceability of regulations to engineering artefacts
• Challenges in modeling regulations (including regulations for specific domains)
• Machine-analyzable representations of regulations
• Ensuring compliance across multiple jurisdictions, domains, and platforms
• Granularity level of legal interpretation
• Change impact analysis of regulatory changes
• Domain-specific compliance checking
• Requirements elicitation from regulations
• Compliance for AI-enabled systems with emphasis on AI regulations
• Legal requirements as non-functional requirements
• Human supervision in the compliance process
• Interpretability – multiple stakeholders use compliance checking systems
• Meta-compliance: the compliance of compliance checking solutions
• Methodological papers on multidisciplinary collaboration
• Theoretical papers on the legal perspective of regulatory compliance
• Risk management and legal accountability within regulatory compliance
• Teaching and education for regulatory compliance

Submission deadline is September 5, 2025.

Further details on the submission process and submission categories can be found in the official call.