Behavior-Driven Explainability

2026-07-27

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge in safety-critical systems where complexity hinders development teams from fully comprehending system behavior and providing trustworthy explanations. To bridge this gap, the paper proposes Behavior-Driven Explainability (BDX), a method that directly translates structured scenarios from Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) into formal behavioral specifications and automatically generates user-oriented explainable outputs. BDX seamlessly integrates system specification with explanation generation, making it applicable across any development phase and abstraction level. The approach is validated through a case study on exception handling in a RISC-V processor, demonstrating that BDX effectively supports explainability requirements early in the design process, thereby significantly enhancing system transparency and trustworthiness.

Abstract

As system complexity has vastly increased, it has become significantly more challenging for a single person or a team to fully understand all aspects of an entire system. Particularly, this holds when considering all the different stages of a system's development life cycle, such as, e.g., design or maintenance. But especially for safety-critical systems it is essential that the final design can be trusted. Because of this, explainability is becoming an important requirement for modern systems. In this paper, we aim to achieve this goal by utilizing Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), where the expected system behavior is given in the form of structured scenarios. These scenarios give a sequence of actions for each functionality, and by this can be directly translated into explanations. We introduce this method of deriving explanations based on the specification as Behavior-Driven Explainability (BDX). While applicable at any development stage or abstraction level, a case study for the explanation of exceptions in a RISC-V processor shows the support this concept adds during system design.

Problem

• explainability
• system complexity
• safety-critical systems
• Behavior-Driven Development
• trust

Innovation

• Behavior-Driven Explainability
• Behavior-Driven Development
• Explainability
• Safety-critical systems
• RISC-V