Evaluating the FREM Taxonomy for Software Forensic Readiness: A Registered Report of Reproducibility, Expert Assessment, and Scenario-Based Utility

This record contains the Stage 1 Registered Report protocol for the prospective evaluation of the FREM Taxonomy for Software Forensic Readiness. The FREM Taxonomy Candidate v0.1 was developed prior to this Registered Report and is treated here as a fixed evaluation object. The registered study evaluates the taxonomy through three complementary activities: (1) independent classification of the 29 FREM constructs to examine reproducibility and classification ambiguity; (2) expert assessment of the taxonomy's understandability, structural coherence, comprehensiveness, usefulness, applicability, extensibility, and relational clarity; and (3) scenario-based evaluation of its utility for structured reasoning about software forensic readiness. The protocol prospectively specifies participant eligibility, recruitment and stopping rules, study materials, quantitative and qualitative measures, exclusion and missing-data rules, outcome-neutral interpretation criteria, and a predefined cross-study adjudication procedure. At the time of this Stage 1 record, no participant has been recruited and no participant-based evaluation data relevant to the registered research questions have been collected or observed. Recruitment and data collection will begin only after the required research ethics clearance and Stage 1 in-principle acceptance by PCI Registered Reports. This Zenodo record provides the version-tracked Stage 1 manuscript submitted to PCI Registered Reports. Subsequent revisions arising from Stage 1 peer review will be deposited as new versions of this record.