Open Access

Christian KüchererORCiD, Linda Gerasch, Denise JungerORCiD, Oliver BurgertORCiD

• Ongoing research indicates the importance of explainabilty as it provides the rationale for results and decision of information systems to users. Explainability must be considered and implemented in software at the early stage in requirements engineering (RE). For the completeness of software requirements specifications, the elicitation and documentation of explainability requirements is essential. Although there are existing studies on explainability in RE, it is not clear yet, how to elicit and document such requirements in detail. Current software development projects miss a clear guidance, how explainability requirements should be specified. Through a review of literature, existing works for elicitation and documentation of explainability requirements are analyzed. Based on these findings, a template and additional guiding for capturing explainability requirements is developed. Following a design science approach, the template is applied and improved in a research project of the medical information domain. The overview of related work presents the current state of research for the documentation of explainability requirements. The template and additional guiding can be used in other information system context for RE elicitation and documentation. The application of the template and the elicitation guidance in a real world case show the refinement and an improved completeness of existing requirements.