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Defining Evaluation Scenarios

Scenarios are specific situations or contexts where your prompt will be used. Well-designed scenarios capture:
  • User Intent Variations: Different goals users might have (seeking information, requesting help, making purchases, reporting problems).
  • Input Diversity: Various ways users might phrase similar requests, from concise to verbose, technical to casual.
  • Context Differences: Different background information, conversation states, or environmental factors affecting the interaction.
  • Edge Cases: Unusual, ambiguous, or challenging situations that might break typical prompt behavior.
  • User Personas: Different user types (experts vs. novices, friendly vs. frustrated, aligned vs. adversarial).

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Maxim AI’s Scenario Evaluation Features

Maxim AI enables comprehensive scenario-based prompt evaluation:
  • Scenario Management: Organize and version test scenarios with rich metadata and categorization.
  • Batch Evaluation: Run prompts against entire scenario suites automatically, executing hundreds of tests in parallel.
  • Scenario-Specific Metrics: Define and track different success criteria for different scenario categories.
  • Comparative Views: Compare how different prompt versions perform across the same scenarios.
  • Failure Clustering: Automatically group similar failures to identify common issues across scenarios.
  • Scenario Analytics: Visualize performance breakdowns by scenario type, difficulty, or other attributes.
Continuous Testing: Integrate scenario evaluation into CI/CD to catch regressions before deployment.

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Best Practices for Scenario-Based Evaluation

  • Start Broad, Then Deep: Begin with diverse scenarios covering all use cases, then add depth within important categories.
  • Update Scenarios Continuously: Add new scenarios based on production failures and user feedback.
  • Balance Coverage and Efficiency: Maintain comprehensive coverage while keeping test execution time reasonable.
  • Version Scenario Suites: Track how your scenario collection evolves alongside your prompt development.
  • Share Scenarios Across Team: Use scenarios as communication tools to align on expected behavior.
  • Monitor Scenario Drift: Track whether real-world usage patterns match your scenario distribution.
By systematically evaluating prompts across diverse scenarios, you build robust AI applications that handle the full complexity of real-world usage, maintaining quality and reliability even in challenging edge cases.