Skill Quality Engineering: The Model, a Practical Guide, and 12 Articles
An introduction to SQEM’s seven quality domains, eight principles, evidence levels, practical adoption, common questions, and the 12-article series.
#Skill Quality Engineering
The Skill Quality Loop: Applying QA Engineering to Agent Skills
Connect Match, Design, Validate, Evaluate, Benchmark, Release, Observe, Regress, and Improve into a sustainable quality loop for Agent Skills.
Skill Evidence: What Does PASS Actually Prove?
Separate static, evaluation, runtime, and real-world evidence, and use PASS, PARTIAL, NOT_RUN, BLOCKED, and INSUFFICIENT_EVIDENCE without overclaiming.
Skill Regression Testing: Proving Changes Did Not Break Existing Behavior
Assess description, instruction, reference, model, and runtime changes with targeted regression evidence that catches silent Skill failures.
Agent Skill Compatibility: Agents, Models, Tools, and Environments
Bring Agent Host, Model, Tools, Environment, and Language into compatibility evidence, and separate specification compatibility from runtime compatibility.
Skill Benchmarking: Is the Skill Actually Better Than the Baseline?
Use a controlled with-Skill versus without-Skill comparison to determine whether an Agent Skill creates real uplift instead of treating one PASS as effectiveness evidence.
Designing Skill Evals: From Success Criteria to Evidence
Turn Skill success criteria into executable Eval Cases, choose a suitable judge, and preserve run metadata, traces, artifacts, and limitations.
Skill Behavior Testing: Evaluate Contracts, Not Exact Answers
Define observable Agent Skill behavior with MUST, SHOULD, and MUST NOT, then evaluate outcomes, trajectories, artifacts, and side effects instead of fixed wording.
Skill Trigger Testing: Can the Agent Select the Right Skill?
Test Skill routing from discovery to trigger and neighboring capability selection with positive, negative, boundary, and paraphrase cases.
The Skill Testing Pyramid: How Much Testing Is Enough?
Use L1 through L4 test depth and E1 through E4 evidence levels to choose how far an Agent Skill should be tested.
Defining Agent Skill Quality: The SQEM Model
Use SQEM’s seven quality domains and eight principles to connect Agent Skill quality claims to evidence without hiding everything behind one score.
What Is an Agent Skill? From Specification to Runtime
Break an Agent Skill into SKILL.md, metadata, references, progressive disclosure, and the runtime chain that turns a package into behavior.