Test Machine Learning Programs -- Part 1: What is Machine Learning?

Machine learning has become an essential part of contemporary software development and it often feels like another big buzzword. What are the challenges and common pitfalls? In this series of articles, I will go through the main strategies to test a program that contains some machine learning components. This first installment of the series is meant to introduce machine learning to the testing engineers/automation developers/performance engineers/ DevOps engineers, and then in the subsequent articles, I will tackle testing efforts on different levels. The best way to explain what machine learning is is to contrast it with classical computing -- AKA operative computing.