Awesome Testing
Guided course + reference

How AI Systems Are Evaluated materials

Every lesson moves through a concise mechanism, experiment, written evidence brief, and checkpoint. Drafts stay in your browser and can be exported as Markdown; the complete theory chapter remains available afterward as optional reference.

Prior knowledge
Basic AI product and testing concepts help. The agent course is useful context, but no statistics beyond rates and intervals is assumed.
Study time
3–4 hours guided · about 9 hours of optional deep dives
By the end
Design an evaluation that supports a real release decision, exposes severe failures, calibrates subjective judges, and remains valid after launch.

10

lesson experiments

10

exportable worksheets

10

reference chapters

10

knowledge checks

Implementation field guide

Tools execute the contract. They do not define its validity.

Choose the smallest stack that makes cases, traces, graders, and decisions reproducible. The durable artifact is the evaluation design and its evidence—not a vendor dashboard.

Trace-linked datasets and experiment runs

Connect dataset items, runs, observations, and evaluator scores so a failed case remains inspectable.

Preserve
Dataset and item versions, trace IDs, evaluator configuration, run metadata, and raw outputs.
Limit
Traceability and stored scores do not establish that the cases or graders measure the right construct.

Config-driven regression and red-team jobs

Run repeatable eval and adversarial suites locally or in CI, with targets and attack strategies under version control.

Preserve
Target and provider versions, config, plugins, strategies, assertions, commit SHA, and discovered regressions.
Limit
Generated attacks are candidate cases. Their threat, expected containment, and severity still need expert review.

Reports, pass/fail suites, and production monitoring

Apply declared metrics and tests to offline batches or monitored production windows, then track their results over time.

Preserve
Sampling window, eligible denominator, metric and threshold versions, slices, exclusions, and response owner.
Limit
A dashboard trend does not prove representativeness, explain causality, or make a release decision.

Test cases, goldens, traces, and span-level checks

Express end-to-end cases and component checks in a pytest-style workflow, including metrics attached to traces and spans.

Preserve
Case lineage, dataset version, expected fields, metric or judge version, threshold, trace, and span boundaries.
Limit
A built-in metric or model judge needs task-specific validation; a named metric is not ground truth.

Model–dataset–metric benchmarks

Run model evaluation suites, retain sample-level results, and use supported bootstrap estimates for uncertainty.

Preserve
Model revision, dataset version and split, preprocessing, backend, metric configuration, samples, and intervals.
Limit
A reproducible model benchmark does not certify the retrieval, tools, policy, interface, or users around a product.

Versioned scorers and trace feedback loops

Keep deterministic scorers and model judges attached to runs and traces, with explicit judge versions and feedback.

Preserve
Scorer implementation or judge prompt, model, rubric, threshold, calibration set, human labels, and run version.
Limit
Operationalizing a scorer does not validate it. Agreement with domain experts must be measured on representative cases.

Canonical learner path

Course chapters

Each route keeps the mandatory learning loop concise, saves its worksheet independently, and loads the long-form chapter only when the learner opens the deep dive.

  1. 01Define the decisionWhat decision should this evaluation support?
  2. 02Design representative casesWhich cases deserve space in a limited evaluation budget?
  3. 03Specify oracles and tracesWhat must be observable for a verdict to be trustworthy?
  4. 04Audit grounded claimsDid the system retrieve and use authoritative evidence?
  5. 05Grade actions and policyDid the copilot take the right action under the right authority?
  6. 06Calibrate subjective judgesHow should open-ended replies be judged?
  7. 07Probe severe failuresWhich attacks and misuse paths could violate the system contract?
  8. 08Report uncertaintyIs the apparent improvement real, useful, and safe?
  9. 09Monitor after launchWhat evidence keeps a release claim valid after launch?
  10. 10Defend the release decisionShould Northstar Support Copilot ship?