An Approach to Support Human-in-the-Loop Big Data Software Development Projects

There is a lack of approaches and tools to support the development of projects in which humans and machines (e.g., machine learning algorithms) need to collaborate to achieve a specified goal. Specifically, given a set of software development tasks to develop a project collaboratively, how can these tasks be assigned to humans or machines to perform each task most efficiently and effectively? Such understanding is essential to support new methodologies for developing human-in-the-loop approaches in which machine learning automated procedures assist software developers in achieving their tasks. This paper describes our work in progress towards providing an approach to guide the assignment of tasks in developing human-in-the-loop big data (science) software development projects. The paper provides several contributions, including the provision of (i) a human-in-the-loop approach for the development of big data software development projects; (ii) the application of the approach to two case studies; (iii) a discussion of implications and research opportunities.