Explainable AI for Software Engineering

The success of software engineering projects largely depends on complex decision-making. For example, which tasks should a developer do first, who should perform this task, is the software of high quality, is a software system reliable and resilient enough to deploy, etc. However, erroneous decision-making for these complex questions is costly in terms of money and reputation. Thus, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) techniques have been widely used in software engineering for developing software analytics tools and techniques to improve decision-making, developer productivity, and software quality. However, the predictions of such AI/ML models for software engineering are still not practical (i.e., coarse-grained), not explainable, and not actionable. These concerns often hinder the adoption of AI/ML models in software engineering practices. In addition, many recent studies still focus on improving the accuracy, while a few of them focus on improving explainability. Are we moving in the right direction? How can we better improve the SE community (both research and education)?In this tutorial, we first provide a concise yet essential introduction to the most important aspects of Explainable AI and a hands-on tutorial of Explainable AI tools and techniques. Then, we introduce the fundamental knowledge of defect prediction (an example application of AI for Software Engineering). Finally, we demonstrate three successful case studies on how Explainable AI techniques can be used to address the aforementioned challenges by making the predictions of software defect prediction models more practical, explainable, and actionable. The materials are available at https://xai4se.github.io.