A Multidisciplinary Electronic Commerce Project Studio for Secure Systems

While the Internet serves as a virtual marketplace that is dramatically changing the way business is conducted, security and privacy issues are of deeper concern than ever before. The evolutionary nature of electronic commerce systems, highlights the need for conceptual support for requirements discovery, elaboration and validation. Moreover, there is great need for mechanisms to provide practitioners with more formal approaches for determining and assessing the security and privacy needs of electronic commerce systems. This paper focuses on the authorsÕ efforts to integrate core research and educational objectives. Our research addresses a number of important issues in the design and evolution of electronic commerce systems. The ultimate goal of our work is to demonstrate viable solutions for supporting the early stages of the software lifecycle, specifically addressing the need for novel approaches to ensure security and privacy requirements coverage. We seek to provide increased visibility into the tasks and process of requirements engineering for evolutionary systems in which policy considerations play a major role. Students, at the undergraduate and graduate level, as well as industrial participants, will employ goals and scenarios throughout the design of electronic commerce systems while applying software engineering principles. A research engine will be used to collect data across various projects with a unique focus on security policy and privacy policy development and their operationalization into system requirements. Practitioners will benefit from stronger guidelines and tools for ensuring requirements coverage as well as from a library of reusable goal classes for software systems in which security and privacy are paramount. The educational objectives include the development of multidisciplinary systems design experiences for students in the form of an undergraduate level project studio specializing in the analysis and design of state of the art electronic commerce systems.