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This paper introduces Behavior-Driven Explainability (BDX), a novel approach that leverages Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to enhance the explainability of complex systems by translating structured scenarios into actionable explanations. The authors argue that as system complexity increases, particularly in safety-critical applications, the ability to trust and understand system behavior becomes paramount. A case study on a RISC-V processor illustrates how BDX facilitates clearer explanations of exceptions, demonstrating its practical utility across various development stages and abstraction levels.
Trust in complex systems can be significantly enhanced through structured explanations derived from Behavior-Driven Development scenarios.
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.
