Requirements practices and gaps when engineering human-centered Artificial Intelligence systems

Abstract

Engineering Artificial Intelligence (AI) software is a relatively new area with many challenges, unknowns, and limited proven best practices. Big companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple have provided a suite of recent guidelines to assist engineering teams in building human-centered AI systems. The practices currently adopted by practitioners for developing such systems, especially during Requirements Engineering (RE), are little studied and reported to date. This paper presents the results of a survey conducted to understand current industry practices in RE for AI (RE4AI) and to determine which key human-centered AI guidelines should be followed. Our survey is based on mapping existing industrial guidelines, best practices, and efforts in the literature. We surveyed 29 professionals and found most participants agreed that all the human-centered aspects we mapped should be addressed in RE. Further, we found that most participants were using UML or Microsoft Office to present requirements. We identify that most of the tools currently used are not equipped to manage AI-based software, and the use of UML and Office may pose issues with the quality of requirements captured for AI. Also, all human-centered practices mapped from the guidelines should be included in RE.