Assign an Owner to Each Feature and Document its Rationale

March, 2023 • Alex Serban, Koen van der Blom, Joost Visser

12 / 46 • Training •

This practice was ranked as medium.
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This practice helps to increase
the software quality.
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Intent

Enhance feature development, understanding and maintenance.

Motivation

In a large data set, with multiple features that are composed from distinct data attributes, it is hard to keep track and understand all features. By assigning an owner and documenting each feature, they become easier to maintain and comprehend.

Applicability

Features should have an owner and documentation whenever features are manually engineered (and not automatically extracted, e.g. through deep learning).

Description

Ensuring that someone in the team is in charge of the information regarding a feature facilitates feature maintainability, and improves the overall understanding of the data and models.

Although feature names can be descriptive, it is important to also document their rationale in order to facilitate communication and share the knowledge among team members.

This practice suggests that whenever a feature owner is leaving a team, the ownership is transferred to other members.

Adoption

Actively Remove or Archive Features That are Not Used

Rules of Machine Learning: Best Practices for ML Engineering