Defesa de Dissertação de Mestrado do aluno Raphael Oliveira Cabral.
Título da dissertação: Investigating the Impact of SOLID Design Principles on Machine Learning Code Understanding
Resumo: The relevance of maintaining clean code to successfully ship software projects has been recognized and studied for over 40 years. This includes Machine Learning (ML) projects that involve iteratively experimenting with data, models, and algorithms, requiring continuous maintenance of such artifacts to take Proof-of-Concept implementations into a production environment. However, today’s ML components are often developed by data scientists who may have a variety of educational backgrounds, such as economics, mathematics, and physics, making them prone to not following software development best practices, potentially leading to code that is difficult to maintain. In order to better understand this phenomenon, we investigated the impact of the SOLID object-oriented design principles for writing clean code on ML code understanding. To this end, we conducted a controlled experiment with three independent trials (exact replications), overall involving 100 data scientists. We restructured ML code from a real industrial setting that did not use SOLID principles. Within each trial, one group was presented with the original ML code, while the other one was presented with ML code incorporating SOLID principles. Participants of both groups were tasked to analyze the code and fill out a questionnaire that included both open-ended and closed-ended questions. The study provides evidence that the adoption of SOLID design principles can improve code understanding within the realm of ML projects. We put forward that software engineering design principles should be spread within the data science community and considered for enhancing the quality of ML code towards more maintainable ML-enabled systems.
Orientador: Prof. Dr. Marcos Kalinowski
Banca:
Prof. Dr. Hélio Côrtes Vieira Lopes
Profª. Dra. Maria Teresa Baldassarre
Assista a defesa pelo link: https://puc-rio.zoom.us/j/4666190940?pwd=eUdNaDNSbnhEY3VWWU1DMGF0SkRjZz09