Explanations in Everyday Software Systems: Towards a Taxonomy for Explainability Needs
Modern software systems are becoming increasingly complex and opaque. The integration of explanations within software has shown the potential to address this opacity and can make the system more understandable to end-users. As a result, explainability has gained much traction as a non-functional requirement of complex systems. Understanding what type of system requires what types of explanations is necessary to facilitate the inclusion of explainability in early software design processes. In order to specify explainability requirements, an explainability taxonomy that applies to a variety of different software types is needed. In this paper, we present the results of an online survey with 84 participants. We asked the participants to state their questions and confusions concerning their three most recently used software systems and elicited both explicit and implicit explainability needs from their statements. These needs were coded by three researchers. In total, we identified and classified 315 explainability needs from the survey answers. Drawing from a large pool of explainability needs and our coding procedure, we present two major contributions of this work: 1) a taxonomy for explainability needs in everyday software systems and 2) an overview of how the need for explanations differs between different types of software systems.
Wed 26 JunDisplayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
13:45 - 15:15 | ExplainabilityResearch Papers / RE@Next! Papers / Industrial Innovation Papers at M101 Chair(s): Krzysztof Wnuk Blekinge Institute of Technology | ||
13:45 30mPaper | Explainability Requirements for Time Series Forecasts: A Study in the Energy Domain Industrial Innovation Papers Jakob Droste Leibniz Universität Hannover, Ronja Fuchs Kraftwerk Kraft-Wärme-Kopplung GmbH, Hannah Deters Leibniz University Hannover, Jil Klünder Leibniz Universität Hannover, Kurt Schneider Leibniz Universität Hannover, Software Engineering Group | ||
14:15 30mPaper | Explainability as a Requirement for Hardware: Introducing Explainable Hardware (XHW) RE@Next! Papers Timo Speith University of Bayreuth, Julian Speith Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), Steffen Becker , Yixin Zou , Asia Biega , Christof Paar Pre-print | ||
14:45 30mPaper | Explanations in Everyday Software Systems: Towards a Taxonomy for Explainability Needs Research Papers Jakob Droste Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannah Deters Leibniz University Hannover, Martin Obaidi Leibniz Universität Hannover, Kurt Schneider Leibniz Universität Hannover, Software Engineering Group Pre-print |