Explainability as a Non-Functional Requirement

Title data

Köhl, Maximilian A. ; Baum, Kevin ; Langer, Markus ; Oster, Daniel ; Speith, Timo ; Bohlender, Dimitri:
Explainability as a Non-Functional Requirement.
In: Damian, Daniela ; Perini, Anna ; Lee, Seok-Won (ed.): 2019 IEEE 27th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). - Piscataway, NJ, USA : IEEE , 2019 . - pp. 363-368
ISBN 978-1-7281-3912-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2019.00046

Project information

Abstract in another language

Recent research efforts strive to aid in designing explainable systems. Nevertheless, a systematic and overarching approach to ensure explainability by design is still missing. Often it is not even clear what precisely is meant when demanding explainability. To address this challenge, we investigate the elicitation, specification, and verification of explainablity as a Non-Functional Requirement (NFR) with the long-term vision of establishing a standardized certification process for the explainability of software-driven systems in tandem with appropriate development techniques. In this work, we carve out different notions of explainability and high-level requirements people have in mind when demanding explainability, and sketch how explainability concerns may be approached in a hypothetical hiring scenario. We provide a conceptual analysis which unifies the different notions of explainability and the corresponding explainability demands.