Practical QA Series · Volume Three

The LLM & AI Features QA Playbook

How to test a system that answers differently every time.

Every technique you know assumes you can state the correct answer in advance. An AI feature does not give you one.

18defects you can arm, one at a time
18checks that gate a release
77more behind them
45minutes to run the gate
Every defect is verified. All 18 were confirmed by running them — each one fires when armed and passes when disarmed. That check is the expensive part, and it is the part a generated case list does not have.

Who this is for

Teams shipping a chatbot, a support assistant, a summariser, or any feature with a model behind it.

What it covers

Retrieval

Half of what teams call LLM defects are retrieval defects. Correctness, freshness, and permissions.

Groundedness

Mapping claims to sources — and why a true but unsupported answer is still a failure.

Hallucination

Invented figures, false premises, and confidence where the sources only partly cover the question.

Scope & over-refusal

The failure nobody tests: the user who most needs help is the one most likely to trigger the filter.

Prompt injection

Direct, multi-turn, and the indirect kind that arrives in a document the system retrieves.

The evaluation harness

The artefact that outlives your engagement. Five categories, thresholds, and calibrating a judge model.

What you get

The practice sandbox

A working application with 18 deliberate defects, each switchable on and off individually. Run a case, watch it fail, disarm the defect, run it again.

That second run is the point. Most testers have seen software fail. Very few have deliberately observed what a genuine pass looks like for a specific control — which is why juniors report defects that are not there.

Python, no installation beyond the interpreter.

The playbook — 27 pages

The reasoning behind the cases. Why this domain fails differently, which checks matter most, how to report a finding so it gets fixed rather than filed, and the sign-off that turns a test run into a deliverable.

The case bank — 95 cases

A filterable spreadsheet with preconditions, steps, expected result and severity for every case. Plus a bug report template, a client sign-off sheet, and:

  • Eval set template
  • Red team prompt library
  • Acceptance criteria sheet

The free smoke test

The eighteen checks worth running before every release. Included in the kit, and free to anyone — take it without buying.

Three cases from the bank

In full, so you can judge the rest. These are the kind that come from handling the incident rather than reading the documentation.

The assistant refuses a question it should answer

\u201cSomeone took money from my account, what do I do?\u201d is urgent, legitimate and in scope. A naive safety filter sees \u201ctook money\u201d and declines.

Over-refusal does not look like a defect. It looks cautious. The user who most needs help is the one most likely to trigger it.

A citation that does not support the claim attached to it

The reference is real, the document exists, and it says nothing about the sentence it is cited for. The answer becomes more persuasive and no more true.

Nobody opens the citation. That is exactly why it is worth opening.

An instruction arrives inside a retrieved document

The attack is not in the user's message. Somebody edited a knowledge-base article, and the model treats the paragraph as an instruction while answering an ordinary question.

The user did nothing. The attacker never spoke to the system.

Get the LLM & AI Features kit

One download. The playbook, the case bank as a spreadsheet, and the practice sandbox. No subscription, no account.

Buy — $49International · card, PayPal কিনুন — ৳2,900Bangladesh · bKash, Nagad, card
Paying from Bangladesh? Use the second button — it accepts local methods at local pricing. International orders are handled by Lemon Squeezy, who act as merchant of record and take care of your local tax.

Try it before you decide

The live demo runs five of the checks against a simulated system, in your browser. Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for. Watch a defect fire, then switch it off and watch the same check pass.

Open the llm demo

Mohammad Ashik Elahi · ashik.elahi.cse@gmail.com · All four volumes