Reducing Pipeline Debt With Great Expectations

This article was first published on Neptune AI's blog. You are a part of a data science team at a product company. Your team has a number of machine learning models in place. Their outputs guide critical business decisions, as well as a couple of dashboards displaying important KPIs that are closely watched by your executives day and night. On that fatal day, you had just brewed yourself a cup of coffee and were about to begin your workday when the universe collapsed. Everyone at the company went crazy. The business metrics dashboard was displaying what seemed to be random numbers (except every full hour, when the KPIs look okay for a short time) and the models were predicting the company's insolvency looming fast. What is worse, every attempt to resolve this madness resulted in your data engineering and research teams reporting new broken services and models. That was the debt collection day and the unpaid debt was of the worst kind: pipeline debt.