The original title is "How to Evaluate a QA Tool Without Being Distracted by the Demo"

Short summary

A practical guide to evaluating QA tools beyond polished demos, focusing on organizational fit, security governance, and real-world operating models. It covers building pre-shortlist scorecards, probing SSO/roles/audit-log behavior, evaluating outsourced QA vendors, and running meaningful trials with representative workflows. The article also extends to testing LLM prompts for regressions, advocating versioned evaluation sets over informal manual review.

• •Build evaluation scorecards before seeing demos to avoid vendor-driven bias
• •Probe security capabilities behaviorally—SSO enforcement, role granularity, audit-log retention—not just feature checklists
• •Trial tools on representative, slightly uncomfortable workflows; extend rigor to LLM prompt regression testing with versioned evaluation sets

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