Four "R"s to Machine Learning Software Development

Having developed and maintained data-driven products based on ML models in production -- across companies of all shapes and sizes, including internationally (!), I've found that there are 4 themes to ML software development.

• 1. Relevance

     • Do you understand the business question, for which you're developing a promising POC to put into production that meets business and technical requirements?

  2. Robustness

     • How robust is the data processing? How high do you score on the ML Test Score (Google, 2017)?

     • Design: Do you have an architecture diagram? Have you defined an input and output spec?

     • Is there a testing suite?

  3. Reproducibility

     • Do you use version control?

     • Package management?

     • Docker?

     • Do you connect to the data source(s) directly?

  4. Readability

     • (Python) Do you follow PEP 8 guidelines? And a style guide?

     • Does the code need refactoring? Or is it (relatively) easy to understand what the code is doing and how to modify it?

     • Is there logging?

     • Should I not ask about documentation? :)

Keywords: Data products, Machine Learning software development

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