Understanding the Complexity and Its Impact on Testing in ML-Enabled Systems
This addresses the challenge of testing in ML-enabled systems for software engineers, but it is incremental as it builds on a system view with a case study.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding complexity in ML-enabled systems and its impact on testing, revealing practical implications for software engineering through a case study on Rasa 3.0.
Machine learning (ML) enabled systems are emerging with recent breakthroughs in ML. A model-centric view is widely taken by the literature to focus only on the analysis of ML models. However, only a small body of work takes a system view that looks at how ML components work with the system and how they affect software engineering for MLenabled systems. In this paper, we adopt this system view, and conduct a case study on Rasa 3.0, an industrial dialogue system that has been widely adopted by various companies around the world. Our goal is to characterize the complexity of such a largescale ML-enabled system and to understand the impact of the complexity on testing. Our study reveals practical implications for software engineering for ML-enabled systems.