Rights-Driven Development

Rights-driven development, or "RDD" for short, is the idea of letting peoples' rights drive software development. It comes out of a critique of the state of contemporary software engineering, which favors speed of development and avoids any kind of up-front analysis.

It is all well and fine to point out that many things cannot effectively be known before development starts. Some things can. What rights people have is one thing that can and should be analysed before sitting down to cut code. Of course, what rights a system may affect may not be entirely clear before development starts, so any impact assessment should be updated as the system under development takes shape.

RDD provides a language for this as well as working practices that help integrate rights impact assessments with contemporary software engineering practices. The language allows rights to be specified using a domain-specific language, which is at the same time easy to read and write and structured so that it can be processed automatically.