Software Requirements Engineering for Transparency

The last decade has seen a period of rapid development for Software Engineering, with ever larger and more complex systems making it harder for end-users to get insights into their data, operations, and functionality. Users often are not aware of the underlying processes of complex system and thus implicitly have to trust them. Trust is vital when it comes to the users’ relationship with the software. Losing the trust of external or internal stakeholders in a product can have a significant negative impact on a company’s success and reputation.

A major factor of users’ trust is the transparency of a system. Transparency is the appropriate amount of information that the user needs from the system to use it successfully (achieve their goals) and exercise informed trust judgment. However, it is vital that transparency is applied correctly and to the right areas in order to enhance users’ trust.

This research develops a methodology to help requirements engineers capture and formulate transparency requirements in order to enhance users’ trust by providing them with the relevant and appropriate information. To substantiate this approach, the relationship between trust and transparency is investigated in a literature study. Then, the Transparency Engineering Methodology (TEM) is developed and evaluated using a case study. TEM has been shown to create greater regard for transparency concerns in the development cycle, leading to the user being informed about how their data used and who has access to it. This degree of transparency is extended to backend and indirect collection processes where informing the user is often overlooked. The positive effect is illustrated by the quality of the output and comments from the developers, which showed that TEM can generate holistic user stories with transparency at the centre.