Helping Software Architects Familiarize with the General Data Protection Regulation

Abstract—The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)impacts any information systems that process personal datain or from the European Union. Yet its enforcement is stillrecent. Organizations under its effect are slow to adopt itsprinciples. One particular difficulty is the low familiarity withthe regulation among software architects and designers. Thedifficulty to interpret the content of the legal regulation ata technical level adds to that. This results in problems inunderstanding the impact and consequences that the regulationmay have in detail for a particular system or project context.In this paper we present some early work and emergingresults related to supporting software architects in this situation.Specifically, we target those who need to understand how theGDPR might impact their design decisions. In the spirit ofarchitectural tactics and patterns, we systematically identifiedand categorized 155 forces in the regulation. These results formthe conceptual base for a first prototypical tool. It enablessoftware architects to identify the relevant forces by guidingthem through an online questionnaire. This leads them to relevantfragments of the GDPR and potentially relevant privacy patterns.We argue that this approach may help software professionals,in particular architects, familiarize with the GDPR and outlinepotential paths for evaluation