Synthetic Evaluation with DeepEval: A Production RAG Testing Framework
Your RAG pipeline passes all 20 of your hand-written test questions. It retrieves the right context, generates grounded answers, and the demo looks great. Then it goes to production, and users start asking the 21st question — the one that exposes a retrieval gap, a hallucinated citation, or a context window that silently truncated the most relevant chunk. You had 20 tests for a knowledge base with 55 documents. That's 0.4% coverage. The other 99.6% was untested surface area.
This guide shows how to close that gap. We walk through a production implementation that generates 330+ synthetic test cases from 55 AI engineering lessons, evaluates a LangGraph-based RAG pipeline across 10+ metrics, and runs hyperparameter sweeps to find optimal retrieval configurations — all automated with DeepEval and pytest.