Meeting in the notebook: a notebook-based environment for micro-submissions in data science collaborations

Abstract: Developers in data science and other domains frequently use computational notebooks to create exploratory analyses and prototype models. However, they often struggle to incorporate existing software engineering tooling into these notebook-based workflows, leading to fragile development processes. We introduce Assembl\'{e}, a new development environment for collaborative data science projects, in which promising code fragments of data science pipelines can be contributed as pull requests to an upstream repository entirely from within JupyterLab, abstracting away low-level version control tool usage. We describe the design and implementation of Assembl\'{e} and report on a user study of 23 data scientists.