Automated trainability evaluation for smart software functions

More and more software-intensive systems employ machine learning and runtime optimization to improve their functionality by providing advanced features (e. g. personal driving assistants or recommendation engines). Such systems incorporate a number of smart software functions (SSFs) which gradually learn and adapt to the users' preferences. A key property of SSFs is their ability to learn based on data resulting from the interaction with the user (implicit and explicit feedback)-which we call trainability. Newly developed and enhanced features in a SSF must be evaluated based on their effect on the trainability of the system. Despite recent approaches for continuous deployment of machine learning systems, trainability evaluation is not yet part of continuous integration and deployment (CID) pipelines. In this paper, we describe the different facets of trainability for the development of SSFs. We also present our approach for automated trainability evaluation within an automotive CID framework which proposes to use automated quality gates for the continuous evaluation of machine learning models. The results from our indicative evaluation based on real data from eight BMW cars highlight the importance of continuous and rigorous trainability evaluation in the development of SSFs.