Choosing compliance solutions through stakeholder preferences

[Context and motivation] Compliance to relevant laws is increasingly recognized as a critical, but also expensive, quality for software requirements. [Question/Problem] Laws contain elements such as conditions and derogations that generate a space of possible compliance alternatives. During requirements engineering, an analyst has to select one of these compliance alternatives and ensure that the requirements specification she is putting together complies with that alternative. However, the space of such alternatives is often large. [Principal ideas and results] This paper extends Nòmos 2, a modeling framework for laws, to support modeling of and reasoning with stakeholder preferences and priorities. The problem of preferred regulatory compliance is then defined as a problem of finding a compliance alternative that matches best stakeholder preferences. [Contribution] The paper defines the concept of preference between situations and integrates it with the Nòmos 2 modeling language. It also presents a reasoning tool for preferences and illustrates its use with an extract from a use case concerning the Italian law on Electronic Health Record.