From Quality Properties to Practice: A Guideline and Workflow for Explainability Requirements

2026-06-09

AI Summary

This study addresses the prevalent ambiguity, inconsistency, and incompleteness in articulating explainability requirements for AI systems due to a lack of standardized specifications. Through a structured literature review and interviews with developers, the authors identify a set of explainability quality attributes, which are then refined via a large-scale survey of practitioners into ten core attributes. For the first time, these attributes are translated into a prioritized, actionable guideline for writing explainability requirements. Building on this foundation, the authors design a lightweight, iterative requirements engineering workflow augmented by a large language model to assist in requirement generation. An accompanying web-based tool reduces average requirement drafting time by 23.5%, and user evaluations indicate that the generated requirements match or slightly exceed manually written ones in terms of implementability and textual quality.

Abstract

Explainability is increasingly required in AI-enabled software systems to support transparency, user trust, and compliance. Yet, explainability requirements are often written ad hoc, and unguided large language model support can yield vague, inconsistent, or incomplete statements. This paper presents a sequential, guideline-driven workflow for formulating explainability requirements and evaluates its tool-based operationalization. We first elicited candidate quality properties through a structured literature review and developer interviews. We then prioritized these properties in an online survey with practitioners (n=20) and derived a concise guideline of ten core properties with actionable formulation instructions. Next, we operationalized the guideline in a web-based tool that supports an iterative workflow of drafting, property-based checks, and revision. We evaluated the workflow in two complementary studies. In a workshop with requirements engineers (n=6), tool support reduced formulation time by 23.5% on average (Wilcoxon p=0.021). In an independent online study with software developers (n=18), tool-supported and manually written requirements received comparable ratings for implementability and formulation quality, with a descriptive slight preference tendency toward the tool-supported versions. Overall, our results suggest that combining a prioritized quality guideline with lightweight LLM support can reduce formulation effort while producing requirements that are perceived comparably to manually written ones.

Problem

• Explainability
• Requirements Engineering
• AI-enabled Software Systems
• Quality Properties
• Natural Language Requirements

Innovation

• Explainability Requirements
• Quality Properties
• Guideline-Driven Workflow
• LLM-Augmented Tooling
• Requirements Engineering