# Behavior-Driven Explainability

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24881 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24881/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Towards Self-Explainable Cyber-Physical Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04698/) (2019)
- [Cases for Explainable Software Systems:Characteristics and Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05980/) (2021)
- [Explainability as a Requirement for Hardware: Introducing Explainable Hardware (XHW)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14661/) (2023)
- [LLM-based Behaviour Driven Development for Hardware Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17814/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As system complexity has vastly increased, it has become significantly more challenging for a single person or a team to fully understand all aspects of an entire system. Particularly, this holds when considering all the different stages of a system's development life cycle, such as, e.g., design or maintenance. But especially for safety-critical systems it is essential that the final design can be trusted. Because of this, explainability is becoming an important requirement for modern systems. In this paper, we aim to achieve this goal by utilizing Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), where the expected system behavior is given in the form of structured scenarios. These scenarios give a sequence of actions for each functionality, and by this can be directly translated into explanations. We introduce this method of deriving explanations based on the specification as Behavior-Driven Explainability (BDX). While applicable at any development stage or abstraction level, a case study for the explanation of exceptions in a RISC-V processor shows the support this concept adds during system design.