REFSQ 2025
Mon 7 - Thu 10 April 2025 Spain

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Context and Motivation: The increasing complexity of modern software systems often challenges users’ abilities to interact with them. Taking established quality attributes such as usability and transparency into account can mitigate this problem, but often do not suffice to completely solve it. Recently, explainability has emerged as essential non-functional requirement to help overcome the aforementioned difficulties. Question/problem: User preferences regarding the integration of explanations in software differ. Neither too few nor too many explanations are helpful. In this paper, we investigate the influence of a user’s subjective mood and objective demographic aspects on explanation needs by means of frequency and type of explanation. Principal ideas/results: Our results reveal a limited relationship between these factors and explanation needs. Two significant correlations were identified: Emotional reactivity was positively correlated with the need for UI explanations, while a negative correlation was found between age and user interface needs. Contribution: As we only find very few significant aspects that influence the need for explanations, we conclude that the need for explanations is very subjective and does only partially depend on objective factors. These findings emphasize the necessity for software companies to actively gather user-specific explainability requirements to address diverse and context-dependent user demands. Nevertheless, future research should explore additional personal traits and cross-cultural factors to inform the development of adaptive, user-centered explanation systems.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 8 Apr

Displayed time zone: Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris change

11:00 - 12:30
Research Track - Session R2 - Crowd and Large-Scale RE IResearch Track at B3 - Teleensenyament
11:00
30m
Talk
Refining and validating change requests from a crowd to derive requirementsTechnical Paper
Research Track
Leon Radeck Heidelberg University, Barbara Paech Heidelberg University
11:30
30m
Talk
Do Users' Explainability Needs in Software Change with Mood?Technical Paper
Research Track
Martin Obaidi Leibniz Universität Hannover, Jakob Droste Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannah Deters Leibniz University Hannover, Marc Herrmann Leibniz Universität Hannover, Jil Klünder University of Applied Sciences | FHDW Hannover, Kurt Schneider Leibniz Universität Hannover, Software Engineering Group
12:00
30m
Talk
Exploring and characterizing Ad-hoc Requirements - A case study at a large-scale systems providerEvaluation Paper
Research Track
Andrea Wohlgemuth Utrecht University & FH Dortmund, Fabiano Dalpiaz Utrecht University, Erik Kamsties FH Dortmund