Towards Understanding Provenance in Industry

TL;DR

This paper explores the needs and perceptions of industry professionals regarding software provenance to enhance trustworthiness, using empirical data to develop a practical influence map for managing provenance concerns.

Contribution

It introduces an empirically-grounded influence map based on industry perceptions to analyze and manage provenance in software systems.

Findings

The influence map helps decision makers address provenance concerns.

Provenance management can be guided by a practitioner-informed checklist.

The approach is bottom-up, based on industry perceptions rather than regulations.

Abstract

Context: Trustworthiness of software has become a first-class concern of users (e.g., to understand software-made decisions). Also, there is increasing demand to demonstrate regulatory compliance of software and end users want to understand how software-intensive systems make decisions that affect them. Objective: We aim to provide a step towards understanding provenance needs of the software industry to support trustworthy software. Provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing data, software, or output of software, and used to assess software quality, reliability and trustworthiness of digital products and services. Method: Based on data from in-person and questionnaire-based interviews with professionals in leadership roles we develop an ``influence map'' to analyze who drives provenance, when provenance is relevant, what is impacted by provenance and how provenance can be managed. Results: The influence map helps decision makers navigate concerns related to provenance. It can also act as a checklist for initial provenance analyses of systems. It is empirically-grounded and designed bottom-up (based on perceptions of practitioners) rather than top-down (from regulations or policies). Conclusion: We present an imperfect first step towards understanding provenance based on current perceptions and offer a preliminary view ahead.