Agility in Software 2.0 -- Notebook Interfaces and MLOps with Buttresses and Rebars
This work targets the engineering community by offering incremental improvements to enhance agility and quality assurance in Software 2.0 development.
The paper addresses agility challenges in machine learning development by proposing solutions for notebook interfaces and MLOps, including transitions to integrated development environments and reinforced engineering with metaphorical buttresses and rebars to support trustworthy AI systems.
Artificial intelligence through machine learning is increasingly used in the digital society. Solutions based on machine learning bring both great opportunities, thus coined "Software 2.0," but also great challenges for the engineering community to tackle. Due to the experimental approach used by data scientists when developing machine learning models, agility is an essential characteristic. In this keynote address, we discuss two contemporary development phenomena that are fundamental in machine learning development, i.e., notebook interfaces and MLOps. First, we present a solution that can remedy some of the intrinsic weaknesses of working in notebooks by supporting easy transitions to integrated development environments. Second, we propose reinforced engineering of AI systems by introducing metaphorical buttresses and rebars in the MLOps context. Machine learning-based solutions are dynamic in nature, and we argue that reinforced continuous engineering is required to quality assure the trustworthy AI systems of tomorrow.