Application of Systems Engineering Process in Building ML-Enabled Systems

Machine learning (ML) components are being added to more and more critical and impactful software systems, but the software development process of real-world production systems from prototyped ML models remains challenging with additional complexity and interdisciplinary collaboration challenges. This poses difficulties in using traditional software lifecycle models such as waterfall, spiral or agile model when building ML-enabled systems. By interviewing with practitioners from multiple companies, we investigated the application of using systems engineering process in ML-enabled systems. We developed a set of propositions and proposed V4ML process model for building products with ML components. We found that V4ML process model requires more efforts on documentation, system decomposition and V&V, but it addressed the interdisciplinary collaboration challenges and additional complexity introduced by ML components.