10.29327/1884517.29-8
The widespread adoption of Intelligent Systems has highlighted the need for explainability as a key non-functional requirement to promote transparency, trust, and user acceptance. Despite its relevance, existing Requirements Engineering (RE) practices still provide limited support for systematically addressing explainability, especially in early development stages. This work aims to integrate explainability into RE through a systematic and process-oriented approach. The paper presents OpenUPExp, an extension of the Open Unified Process that introduces explicit roles, activities, and artifacts for explainability requirements. The framework structures explainability concerns across RE activities and supports their progressive refinement throughout development. An initial fragment of the framework was evaluated through an illustrative scenario analyzed by RE specialists to assess coherence and artifact clarity. The evaluation indicates that OpenUPExp provides useful guidance for incorporating explainability into RE, while also revealing aspects that require further refinement. The findings suggest the potential of the framework to support a more systematic treatment of explainability in Intelligent Systems.
Keywords: Requirements; Explainability; Intelligent Systems; OpenUP
@inproceedings{wer202607,
author = {Mancine, L. and Braga, R. and Bulcão-Neto, R.},
title = {Toward a Framework for Explainability in Intelligent Systems: Preliminary Results},
booktitle = {Anais do Workshop em Engenharia de Requisitos - Proceedings of the 29th Workshop on Requirements Engineering (WER2026)},
year = {2026},
issn = {2675-0066},
isbn = {978-65-02-19591-8},
doi = {10.29327/1884517.29-8}
}