Explainable Software Engineering

Keynote delivered at the <a href="https://events.bits-chips.nl/bitschips-event/">Bits & Chips Event</a> held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, on October 12, 2023. In artificial intelligence (AI), it’s increasingly recognized that components that learn from data need to be explainable. In this talk, we take explainability one step further, using it as a lens to rethink the full software engineering life cycle. To that end, we consider explainability of both the software engineering process and the resulting software system. We use this to shed new light on bug fixing, the use of language models during coding, delay prediction during agile planning, and the digitalization of society. Based on this, we envision a future of software engineering in which explainability is a first-class citizen. Relevant links and papers covered: - Tim Miller. Explanation in artificial intelligence: Insights from the social sciences. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.07269 - Patrick Altmeyer, Arie van Deursen, Cynthia Liem. Explaining Black-Box Models through Counterfactuals. JuliaCon 2023. https://proceedings.juliacon.org/papers/10.21105/jcon.00130 - Patrick Altmeyer, Giovan Angela, Aleksander Buszydlik, Karol Dobiczek, Arie van Deursen, Cynthia Liem. Endogenous Macrodynamics in Algorithmic Recourse. IEEE SaTML, 2023. https://openreview.net/pdf?id=-LFT2YicI9v - Taija: Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in Julia. https://github.com/JuliaTrustworthyAI - Matthías Páll Gissurarson, Leonhard Applis, Annibale Panichella, Arie van Deursen, David Sands. PropR: property-based automatic program repair. ICSE 2022. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3510003.3510620 - Code4Me. https://code4me.me/ - The AI for Software Engineering (AI4SE) Lab. JetBrains & TU Delft, 2023. https://lp.jetbrains.com/research/ai-for-se/ - Elvan Kula, Eric Greuter, Arie van Deursen, Georgios Gousios; Dynamic Prediction of Delays in Software Projects using Delay Patterns and Bayesian Modeling. FSE 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12449 - Elvan Kula, Eric Greuter, Arie van Deursen, Georgios Gousios; Factors Affecting On-Time Delivery in Large-Scale Agile Software Development. IEEE TSE 2022. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9503331 - Adviescollege ICT Toeting, AcICT / Advisory Council on IT Assessment. 2023. https://www.adviescollegeicttoetsing.nl/