What a Useful Agent Evaluation Report Should Contain
Shashank Agarwal
An evaluation report should let another engineer understand what was tested and why the result supports a decision. A score without configuration or case evidence is difficult to review or reproduce.
Quick answer: Include the decision, tested configuration, dataset version, execution status, results by meaningful group and links to decisive evidence. State exclusions and unresolved questions. Finish with the proposed action and its owner, keeping recommendations separate from changes actually deployed.
Lead with the decision being considered
For an illustrative scheduling assistant, the question might be whether a revised prompt handles caller corrections without disturbing straightforward bookings. That focus determines which comparisons belong in the report.
Do not imply that a narrowly scoped test approves every workflow the application supports.
Use a compact report structure
| Section | Minimum useful content |
|---|---|
| Decision | What the review is intended to approve or reject |
| Configuration | Agent, prompt, model, tools and relevant environment versions |
| Dataset | Case version, selection method and coverage limits |
| Execution | Attempted, evaluable, failed and excluded runs |
| Findings | Component results and important changed cases |
| Evidence | Relevant traces, assertions and reviewer explanations |
| Next action | Proposed change, review owner and verification step |
This is a proposed report template. It does not claim that every field is captured automatically by an evaluation platform.
Make comparisons inspectable
Show baseline and candidate under comparable conditions. Note changed fixtures, tool behavior or evaluator versions that complicate interpretation.
Retain regressions alongside improvements. A headline that says “better” should not hide a failure in a required permission condition.
End with an executable next step
A useful recommendation could be: “Review how the candidate updates the selected day after a correction, then rerun the affected scenarios and the stable booking set.”
That is more actionable than “improve reasoning.” The report should also say whether the proposed change has been reviewed, implemented or tested. A recommendation alone is not evidence of a fix.
I'm Shashank Agarwal, founder and CEO of Noveum AI and creator of API.market. My preferred report makes its conclusion easy to challenge with the underlying evidence.
See the tool-boundary guide for operation records and the regression-test guide for reproducible cases.
Follow my work on LinkedIn. Drafted with AI assistance.
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