The outcome
Replace anecdotal RAG testing with repeatable evidence for relevance, faithfulness, latency, and cost.
Step by step
A workflow you can repeat.
- 01
Create a representative dataset with queries, expected source IDs, reference answers or criteria, and difficult no-answer cases.
- 02
Measure retrieval with appropriate ranking metrics and inspect false positives, false negatives, permission errors, and stale documents.
- 03
Measure response faithfulness, relevance, correctness, citation support, refusal behavior, latency, and model or embedding cost.
- 04
Trace loading, indexing, retrieval, reranking, prompt construction, and generation so each failed example has a diagnosable stage.
- 05
Set release thresholds, compare changes against a fixed baseline, review evaluator disagreements, and monitor sampled production traffic safely.
Working standard
What good use looks like.
- Keep a fixed regression set.
- Separate retrieval and answer metrics.
- Review automated evaluator failures manually.
Official references