Tackling Collaboration Challenges in the Development of ML-Enabled Systems

Collaboration on complex development projects almost always presents challenges. For traditional software projects, these challenges are well known, and over the years a number of approaches to addressing them have evolved. But as machine learning (ML) becomes an essential component of more and more systems, it poses a new set of challenges to development teams. Chief among these challenges is getting data scientists (who employ an experimental approach to system model development) and software developers (who rely on the discipline imposed by software engineering principles) to work harmoniously. In this SEI blog post, which is adapted from a recently published paper to which I contributed, I highlight the findings of a study on which I teamed up with colleagues Nadia Nahar (who led this work as part of her PhD studies at Carnegie Mellon University and Christian Kästner (also from Carnegie Mellon University) and Shurui Zhou (of the University of Toronto).The study sought to identify collaboration challenges common to the development of ML-enabled systems.