Data management and Data Pipelines: An empirical investigation in the embedded systems domain

Context: Companies are increasingly collecting data from all possible sources to extract insights that help in data-driven decision-making. Increased data volume, variety, and velocity and the impact of poor quality data on the development of data products are leading companies to look for an improved data management approach that can accelerate the development of high-quality data products. Further, AI is being applied in a growing number of fields, and thus it is evolving as a horizontal technology. Consequently, AI components are increasingly been integrated into embedded systems along with electronics and software. We refer to these systems as AI-enhanced embedded systems. Given the strong dependence of AI on data, this expansion also creates a new space for applying data management techniques. Objective: The overall goal of this thesis is to empirically identify the data management challenges encountered during the development and maintenance of AI-enhanced embedded systems, propose an improved data management approach and empirically validate the proposed approach.Method: To achieve the goal, we conducted this research in close collaboration with Software Center companies using a combination of different empirical research methods: case studies, literature reviews, and action research.Results and conclusions: This research provides five main results. First, it identifies key data management challenges specific to Deep Learning models developed at embedded system companies. Second, it examines the practices such as DataOps and data pipelines that help to address data management challenges. We observed that DataOps is the best data management practice that improves the data quality and reduces the time tdevelop data products. The data pipeline is the critical component of DataOps that manages the data life cycle activities. The study also provides the potential faults at each step of the data pipeline and the corresponding mitigation strategies. Finally, the data pipeline model is realized in a small piece of data pipeline and calculated the percentage of saved data dumps through the implementation.Future work: As future work, we plan to realize the conceptual data pipeline model so that companies can build customized robust data pipelines. We also plan to analyze the impact and value of data pipelines in cross-domain AI systems and data applications. We also plan to develop AI-based fault detection and mitigation system suitable for data pipelines

Modelling Data Pipelines

Data is the new currency and key to success. However, collecting high-quality data from multiple distributed sources requires much effort. In addition, there are several other challenges involved while transporting data from its source to the destination. Data pipelines are implemented in order to increase the overall efficiency of data-flow from the source to the destination since it is automated and reduces the human involvement which is required otherwise. Despite existing research on ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) and ELT (Extract-Load-Transform) pipelines, the research on this topic is limited. ETL/ELT pipelines are abstract representations of the end-to-end data pipelines. To utilize the full potential of the data pipeline, we should understand the activities in it and how they are connected in an end-to-end data pipeline. This study gives an overview of how to design a conceptual model of data pipeline which can be further used as a language of communication between different data teams. Furthermore, it can be used for automation of monitoring, fault detection, mitigation and alarming at different steps of data pipeline

A taxonomy of software engineering challenges for machine learning systems: An empirical investigation

Artificial intelligence enabled systems have been an inevitable part of everyday life. However, efficient software engineering principles and processes need to be considered and extended when developing AI- enabled systems. The objective of this study is to identify and classify software engineering challenges that are faced by different companies when developing software-intensive systems that incorporate machine learning components. Using case study approach, we explored the development of machine learning systems from six different companies across various domains and identified main software engineering challenges. The challenges are mapped into a proposed taxonomy that depicts the evolution of use of ML components in software-intensive system in industrial settings. Our study provides insights to software engineering community and research to guide discussions and future research into applied machine learning

Data management for production quality deep learning models: Challenges and solutions

Deep learning (DL) based software systems are difficult to develop and maintain in industrial settings due to several challenges. Data management is one of the most prominent challenges which complicates DL in industrial deployments. DL models are data-hungry and require high-quality data. Therefore, the volume, variety, velocity, and quality of data cannot be compromised. This study aims to explore the data management challenges encountered by practitioners developing systems with DL components, identify the potential solutions from the literature and validate the solutions through a multiple case study. We identified 20 data management challenges experienced by DL practitioners through a multiple interpretive case study. Further, we identified 48 articles through a systematic literature review that discuss the solutions for the data management challenges. With the second round of multiple case study, we show that many of these solutions have limitations and are not used in practice due to a combination of four factors: high cost, lack of skill-set and infrastructure, inability to solve the problem completely, and incompatibility with certain DL use cases. Thus, data management for data-intensive DL models in production is complicated. Although the DL technology has achieved very promising results, there is still a significant need for further research in the field of data management to build high-quality datasets and streams that can be used for building production-ready DL systems. Furthermore, we have classified the data management challenges into four categories based on the availability of the solutions.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

From Ad-Hoc Data Analytics to DataOps

The collection of high-quality data provides a key competitive advantage to companies in their decision-making process. It helps to understand customer behavior and enables the usage and deployment of new technologies based on machine learning. However, the process from collecting the data, to clean and process it to be used by data scientists and applications is often manual, non-optimized and error-prone. This increases the time that the data takes to deliver value for the business. To reduce this time companies are looking into automation and validation of the data processes. Data processes are the operational side of data analytic workflow.DataOps, a recently coined term by data scientists, data analysts and data engineers refer to a general process aimed to shorten the end-to-end data analytic life-cycle time by introducing automation in the data collection, validation, and verification process. Despite its increasing popularity among practitioners, research on this topic has been limited and does not provide a clear definition for the term or how a data analytic process evolves from ad-hoc data collection to fully automated data analytics as envisioned by DataOps.This research provides three main contributions. First, utilizing multi-vocal literature we provide a definition and a scope for the general process referred to as DataOps. Second, based on a case study with a large mobile telecommunication organization, we analyze how multiple data analytic teams evolve their infrastructure and processes towards DataOps. Also, we provide a stairway showing the different stages of the evolution process. With this evolution model, companies can identify the stage which they belong to and also, can try to move to the next stage by overcoming the challenges they encounter in the current stage

On the Trade-off Between Robustness and Complexity in Data Pipelines

Data pipelines play an important role throughout the data management process whether these are used for data analytics or machine learning. Data-driven organizations can make use of data pipelines for producing good quality data applications. Moreover, data pipelines ensure end-to-end velocity by automating the processes involved in extracting, transforming, combining, validating, and loading data for further analysis and visualization. However, the robustness of data pipelines is equally important since unhealthy data pipelines can add more noise to the input data. This paper identifies the essential elements for a robust data pipeline and analyses the trade-off between data pipeline robustness and complexity

Customer Support In The Era of Continuous Deployment: A Software-Intensive Embedded Systems Case Study

Supporting customers after they acquire the prod-uct is essential for companies producing and selling software-intensive embedded systems products. Generally, customer sup-port is the first interaction point between the product users and the product vendor. Customer support is often engaged with answering customers\u27 questions, troubleshooting, fault identification, and fixing product faults. While continuous deployment advocates for closer cooperation between the ones operating the software and the ones developing it, the means of such collaboration in general and the role of customer support, in particular, has not been addressed in the context of software-intensive embedded systems. Therefore, to better understand the impact that continuous deployment has on customer support and the role customer support should play in this context, we conducted a case study at a multinational company developing and selling telecommunications networks infrastructure. We focused on the 4th and 5th Generation (4G and 5G) Radio Access Networks (RAN) products, which can be considered a high volume product as they cover more than 80% of the world\u27s population. Our study reveals that customer support needs to transition from a transaction-based and passive function triggered by customer support requests, to take an active role characterized by being proactive and preemptive to cope with the shorter operational time of a software version introduced by continuous deployment. In addition, customer support plays an essential role in making the feedback actionable by aggregating and consolidating feedback data to the R&D organization

On the Impact of ML use cases on Industrial Data Pipelines

The impact of the Artificial Intelligence revolution is undoubtedly substantial in our society, life, firms, and employment. With data being a critical element, organizations are working towards obtaining high-quality data to train their AI models. Although data, data management, and data pipelines are part of industrial practice even before the introduction of ML models, the significance of data increased further with the advent of ML models, which force data pipeline developers to go beyond the traditional focus on data quality. The objective of this study is to analyze the impact of ML use cases on data pipelines. We assume that the data pipelines that serve ML models are given more importance compared to the conventional data pipelines. We report on a study that we conducted by observing software teams at three companies as they develop both conventional(Non-ML) data pipelines and data pipelines that serve ML-based applications. We study six data pipelines from three companies and categorize them based on their criticality and purpose. Further, we identify the determinants that can be used to compare the development and maintenance of these data pipelines. Finally, we map these factors in a two-dimensional space to illustrate their importance on a scale of low, moderate, and high

Large-scale machine learning systems in real-world industrial settings: A review of challenges and solutions

Background : Developing and maintaining large scale machine learning (ML) based software systems in an in-dustrial setting is challenging. There are no well-established development guidelines, but the literature contains reports on how companies develop and maintain deployed ML-based software systems. Objective : This study aims to survey the literature related to development and maintenance of large scale ML -based systems in industrial settings in order to provide a synthesis of the challenges that practitioners face. In addition, we identify solutions used to address some of these challenges. Method : A systematic literature review was conducted and we identified 72 papers related to development and maintenance of large scale ML-based software systems in industrial settings. The selected articles were qualita-tively analyzed by extracting challenges and solutions. The challenges and solutions were thematically synthe-sized into four quality attributes: adaptability, scalability, safety and privacy. The analysis was done in relation to ML workflow, i.e. data acquisition, training, evaluation, and deployment. Results : We identified a total of 23 challenges and 8 solutions related to development and maintenance of large scale ML-based software systems in industrial settings including six different domains. Challenges were most often reported in relation to adaptability and scalability. Safety and privacy challenges had the least reported solutions. Conclusion : The development and maintenance on large-scale ML-based systems in industrial settings introduce new challenges specific for ML, and for the known challenges characteristic for these types of systems, require new methods in overcoming the challenges. The identified challenges highlight important concerns in ML system development practice and the lack of solutions point to directions for future research

Towards automated detection of data pipeline faults

Data pipelines play an important role throughout the data management process. It automates the steps ranging from data generation to data reception thereby reducing the human intervention. A failure or fault in a single step of a data pipeline has cascading effects that might result in hours of manual intervention and clean-up. Data pipeline failure due to faults at different stages of data pipelines is a common challenge that eventually leads to significant performance degradation of data-intensive systems. To ensure early detection of these faults and to increase the quality of the data products, continuous monitoring and fault detection mechanism should be included in the data pipeline. In this study, we have explored the need for incorporating automated fault detection mechanisms and mitigation strategies at different stages of the data pipeline. Further, we identified faults at different stages of the data pipeline and possible mitigation strategies that can be adopted for reducing the impact of data pipeline faults thereby improving the quality of data products. The idea of incorporating fault detection and mitigation strategies is validated by realizing a small part of the data pipeline using action research in the analytics team at a large software-intensive organization within the telecommunication domain