Collaboration Challenges in Building ML-Enabled Systems: Communication, Documentation, Engineering, and ProcessDistinguished Paper Award
Thu 12 May 2022 13:25 - 13:30 at ICSE room 4-odd hours - Machine Learning with and for SE 12 Chair(s): Wei Yang
Fri 27 May 2022 11:25 - 11:30 at Room 301+302 - Papers 19: Machine Learning with and for SE 2 Chair(s): Dalal Alrajeh
Fri 27 May 2022 13:30 - 15:00 at Ballroom Gallery - Posters 3
The introduction of machine learning (ML) components in software projects has created the need for software engineers to collaborate with data scientists and other specialists. While collaboration can always be challenging, ML introduces additional challenges with its exploratory model development process, additional skills and knowledge needed, difficulties testing ML systems, need for continuous evolution and monitoring, and non-traditional quality requirements such as fairness and explainability. Through interviews with 45 practitioners from 28 organizations, we identified key collaboration challenges that teams face when building and deploying ML systems into production. We report on common collaboration points in the development of production ML systems for requirements, data, and integration, as well as corresponding team patterns and challenges. We find that most of these challenges center around communication, documentation, engineering, and process and collect recommendations to address these challenges.