TEM: A Transparency Engineering Methodology Enabling Users’ Trust Judgement

Abstract

Transparency is key to enhancing users’ trust by enabling their judgment on the outcomes and consequences of a system’s operations. This paper presents the transparency engineering methodology (TEM) to generate transparency requirements that enable users’ trust judgement. The idea is to identify where transparency is lacking and to address this through patterns augmenting the specification of data, use case, and process requirements. Due to the complexity of software, it is impossible (and undesirable) to achieve full transparency throughout the system. However, transparency can be improved for selected system aspects. This is demonstrated using the results from an industrial case study with a medical technology company where, with the help of TEM, existing functional requirements were refined, and transparency requirements generated systematically.