Understanding the GDPR from a requirements engineering perspective—a systematic mapping study on regulatory data protection requirements

Data protection compliance is critical from a requirements engineering (RE) perspective, both from a software development lifecycle (SDLC) perspective and regulatory compliance. Not including these requirements from the early phases of the SDLC can prove costly and challenging afterward. The general data protection regulation (GDPR) from the European Union (EU) sets a list of requirements that organizations working within its scope should satisfy. However, these requirements are complex to work with, as legal prose tends to be vague and imprecise, and not all requirements have received the same attention from researchers. This study aims to identify the research published in RE for helping compliance with regulatory data protection requirements. We gathered and analyzed 90 articles from 2016 to 2022 through a systematic mapping study. We analyzed key trends in the sample, such as year of publication, publication venue, type of research, interdisciplinarity in the author’s background, GDPR focus of compliance element, and type of proposal. Our main findings show ongoing interest, mostly published in conferences, in achieving overall compliance with the GDPR and consent as the most popular topics. Other topics, such as cookies or children’s data, did not receive significant attention. Research over the whole RE process has been done. 20 (22%) of the papers have authors affiliated with non-computer science; however, most research seems not interdisciplinary. We finally discuss gaps in the literature, possible future areas of research, and the importance of interdisciplinary research for regulatory data protection requirements in RE.