Jiahuei Lin

Ahmed E. Hassan, Dayi Lin, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur et al.

Foundation models (FMs), such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have revolutionized software development by enabling new use cases and business models. We refer to software built using FMs as FMware. The unique properties of FMware (e.g., prompts, agents, and the need for orchestration), coupled with the intrinsic limitations of FMs (e.g., hallucination) lead to a completely new set of software engineering challenges. Based on our industrial experience, we identified 10 key SE4FMware challenges that have caused enterprise FMware development to be unproductive, costly, and risky. In this paper, we discuss these challenges in detail and state the path for innovation that we envision. Next, we present FMArts, which is our long-term effort towards creating a cradle-to-grave platform for the engineering of trustworthy FMware. Finally, we (i) show how the unique properties of FMArts enabled us to design and develop a complex FMware for a large customer in a timely manner and (ii) discuss the lessons that we learned in doing so. We hope that the disclosure of the aforementioned challenges and our associated efforts to tackle them will not only raise awareness but also promote deeper and further discussions, knowledge sharing, and innovative solutions across the software engineering discipline.

Kirill Vasilevski, Benjamin Rombaut, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur et al.

Foundation Models (FMs) such as Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping the software industry by enabling FMware, systems that integrate these FMs as core components. In this KDD 2025 tutorial, we present a comprehensive exploration of FMware that combines a curated catalogue of challenges with real-world production concerns. We first discuss the state of research and practice in building FMware. We further examine the difficulties in selecting suitable models, aligning high-quality domain-specific data, engineering robust prompts, and orchestrating autonomous agents. We then address the complex journey from impressive demos to production-ready systems by outlining issues in system testing, optimization, deployment, and integration with legacy software. Drawing on our industrial experience and recent research in the area, we provide actionable insights and a technology roadmap for overcoming these challenges. Attendees will gain practical strategies to enable the creation of trustworthy FMware in the evolving technology landscape.

Jiahuei Lin, Dayi Lin, Sky Zhang et al.

AI judge systems are designed to automatically evaluate Foundation Model-powered software (i.e., FMware). Due to the intrinsic dynamic and stochastic nature of FMware, the development of AI judge systems requires a unique engineering life cycle and presents new challenges. In this paper, we discuss the challenges based on our industrial experiences in developing AI judge systems for FMware. These challenges lead to substantial time consumption, cost and inaccurate judgments. We propose a framework that tackles the challenges with the goal of improving the productivity of developing high-quality AI judge systems. Finally, we evaluate our framework with a case study on judging a commit message generation FMware. The accuracy of the judgments made by the AI judge system developed with our framework outperforms those made by the AI judge system that is developed without our framework by up to 6.2%, with a significant reduction in development effort.