Explainable software systems

Software and software-controlled technical systems play an increasing role in our daily lives. In cyber-physical systems, which connect the physical and the digital world, software does not only influence how we perceive and interact with our environment but software also makes decisions that influence our behavior. Therefore, the ability of software systems to explain their behavior and decisions will become an important property that will be crucial for their acceptance in our society. We call software systems with this ability explainable software systems. In the past, we have worked on methods and tools to design explainable software systems. In this article, we highlight some of our work on how to design explainable software systems. More specifically, we describe an architectural framework for designing self-explainable software systems, which is based on the MAPE-loop for self-adaptive systems. Afterward, we show that explainability is also important for tools that are used by engineers during the development of software systems. We show examples from the area of requirements engineering where we use techniques from natural language processing and neural networks to help engineers comprehend the complex information structures embedded in system requirements

Explaining Levels of Customer Satisfaction with First Contact with Jobcentre Plus: results of qualitative research with Jobcentre Plus Staff

This report is a follow up to the First Contact Customer Survey (Research Report 504). As a result of ongoing difficulties accessing data for sampling purposes, the initial plan to undertake qualitative follow-up research with customers was abandoned in favour of research with staff to explore process-related issues which might explain customer responses. The research was undertaken in September and October 2008 and included telephone interviews with senior staff combined with face-to-face interviews and structured observations with staff in Contact Centres, Jobcentres and Benefit Delivery Centres in four Jobcentre Plus regions. Findings relate specifically to staff perceptions of customer satisfaction with first contact

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow