The Hitchhikers Guide to Production-ready Trustworthy Foundation Model powered Software (FMware)
Kirill Vasilevski, Benjamin Rombaut, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Gustavo A. Oliva, Keheliya Gallaba, Filipe R. Cogo, Jiahuei Lin, Dayi Lin, Haoxiang Zhang, Bouyan Chen, Kishanthan Thangarajah, Ahmed E. Hassan, Zhen Ming Jiang

TL;DR
This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges, practices, and strategies for developing trustworthy foundation model-based software systems, emphasizing real-world deployment and integration issues.
Contribution
It offers a curated catalog of challenges and practical insights for building production-ready, trustworthy FMware systems, combining research and industrial experience.
Findings
Identifies key challenges in FMware development.
Provides actionable strategies for deployment and trustworthiness.
Outlines a technology roadmap for FMware creation.
Abstract
Foundation Models (FMs) such as Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping the software industry by enabling FMware, systems that integrate these FMs as core components. In this KDD 2025 tutorial, we present a comprehensive exploration of FMware that combines a curated catalogue of challenges with real-world production concerns. We first discuss the state of research and practice in building FMware. We further examine the difficulties in selecting suitable models, aligning high-quality domain-specific data, engineering robust prompts, and orchestrating autonomous agents. We then address the complex journey from impressive demos to production-ready systems by outlining issues in system testing, optimization, deployment, and integration with legacy software. Drawing on our industrial experience and recent research in the area, we provide actionable insights and a technology roadmap for…
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