Ali Pourghasemi Fatideh

arXiv2026

The Role of Online Forums in Developer Understanding of Privacy Law -- A Reddit Case Study

Software practitioners use online forums to navigate complex and often ambiguous legal privacy requirements, yet little is known about their professional backgrounds, what challenges they face, and how they use and assess the credibility of the advice received, or how they resolve ambiguities in posts. We report the findings of a survey of 223 Reddit users from regulatory-focused subreddits, complemented by a qualitative analysis of 2,248 posts and responses. Our results show that, despite holding privacy-related certifications, most participants frequently use forums to seek legal advice. Key challenges reported or identified include implementing a data protection impact assessment, reporting a data breach, and obtaining cookie consent. Reddit users often assess credibility by reviewing respondents' post history, verifying sources cited, trusting advice from recognized experts, and following up for clarity before responding. We highlight research and educational directions to bridge gaps in support needed for regulatory compliance guidance.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Accuracy and Satisfaction in Multi-Turn LLM Dialogues for NFR Assessment

LLM-based dialogue assistants have become mainstream tools for software developers, yet current evaluation benchmarks focus exclusively on functional correctness. This leaves a critical gap in assessing the quality and accuracy of these conversations when handling Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), which are inherently vague, context-dependent, and involve many parts of a program. Evaluating how well these systems support collaborative reasoning about NFRs requires methods that go beyond single-turn accuracy to capture both the correctness of the system's outputs and the quality of the multi-turn interaction. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy and quality of multi-turn conversations between developers and an LLM-based agent in the domain of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulatory compliance. We hired 49 programmers to interact with GitHub Copilot to assess 148 HIPAA-derived NFRs against the iTrust codebase, a system designed to comply with HIPAA regulations, across three dimensions: requirement satisfaction level, reasoning, and code localization. We find that developers tend to agree with LLM assessments, but accuracy against expert ground truth is low. We model user satisfaction and find that longer system responses and more information-providing turns negatively affect user satisfaction, whereas proactive interactions positively affect it. Our findings provide insights for designing LLM-based dialogue systems that support NFR assessment.

cs.AI↗