TY - JOUR

T1 - Explainability as a non-functional requirement

T2 - challenges and recommendations

AU - Chazette, Larissa

AU - Schneider, Kurt

N1 - Funding Information: Open Access funding provided by Projekt DEAL. This work was supported by the research initiative Mobilise between the Technical University of Braunschweig and Leibniz University Hannover, funded by the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony. We thank colleagues Wasja Brunotte and Nils Prenner for their feedback on the manuscript.

PY - 2020/12

Y1 - 2020/12

N2 - Software systems are becoming increasingly complex. Their ubiquitous presence makes users more dependent on their correctness in many aspects of daily life. As a result, there is a growing need to make software systems and their decisions more comprehensible, with more transparency in software-based decision making. Transparency is therefore becoming increasingly important as a non-functional requirement. However, the abstract quality aspect of transparency needs to be better understood and related to mechanisms that can foster it. The integration of explanations into software has often been discussed as a solution to mitigate system opacity. Yet, an important first step is to understand user requirements in terms of explainable software behavior: Are users really interested in software transparency and are explanations considered an appropriate way to achieve it? We conducted a survey with 107 end users to assess their opinion on the current level of transparency in software systems and what they consider to be the main advantages and disadvantages of embedded explanations. We assess the relationship between explanations and transparency and analyze its potential impact on software quality. As explainability has become an important issue, researchers and professionals have been discussing how to deal with it in practice. While there are differences of opinion on the need for built-in explanations, understanding this concept and its impact on software is a key step for requirements engineering. Based on our research results and on the study of existing literature, we offer recommendations for the elicitation and analysis of explainability and discuss strategies for the practice.

AB - Software systems are becoming increasingly complex. Their ubiquitous presence makes users more dependent on their correctness in many aspects of daily life. As a result, there is a growing need to make software systems and their decisions more comprehensible, with more transparency in software-based decision making. Transparency is therefore becoming increasingly important as a non-functional requirement. However, the abstract quality aspect of transparency needs to be better understood and related to mechanisms that can foster it. The integration of explanations into software has often been discussed as a solution to mitigate system opacity. Yet, an important first step is to understand user requirements in terms of explainable software behavior: Are users really interested in software transparency and are explanations considered an appropriate way to achieve it? We conducted a survey with 107 end users to assess their opinion on the current level of transparency in software systems and what they consider to be the main advantages and disadvantages of embedded explanations. We assess the relationship between explanations and transparency and analyze its potential impact on software quality. As explainability has become an important issue, researchers and professionals have been discussing how to deal with it in practice. While there are differences of opinion on the need for built-in explanations, understanding this concept and its impact on software is a key step for requirements engineering. Based on our research results and on the study of existing literature, we offer recommendations for the elicitation and analysis of explainability and discuss strategies for the practice.

KW - Explainability

KW - Non-functional requirements

KW - Software quality

KW - Software transparency

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85086593033&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s00766-020-00333-1

DO - 10.1007/s00766-020-00333-1

M3 - Article

VL - 25

SP - 493

EP - 514

JO - Requirements engineering

JF - Requirements engineering

SN - 0947-3602

IS - 4

ER -