Weekly Round Trips from Norms to Requirements and Tests: An Industrial Experience Report

SEAC is a major software provider in Italy in the area of business management, with a focus on norms and human resources. SEAC is re-engineering their huge legacy system to C#/SQL Server. To minimise the risks associated with such reengineering project, SEAC has adopted an incremental and agile process model, which produces small and frequent releases of new, incremental modules that replace a portion of the legacy system at a time. Since the SEAC software handles business activities that are highly dependent on norms, such as the contracts of employees, the taxation of incomes and salaries, the pension contributions, one of the key challenges is to support a smooth transformation of norms into requirements, into code and eventually into test cases used to verify that norms have been implemented as prescribed by the law. The SE research unit at FBK has been involved to introduce a set of practices aimed at supporting such transformation, so as to improve the current process. We report the experience made during the project in this paper.