EngineeringMay 30, 202618 min read

Harness-Driven Development: Building Agentic Systems from Runtime Evidence Backward

A development method where scenarios, gates, scorecards, and repair boundaries are designed before implementation

Harness-driven development treats the dynamic harness as the primary specification. Instead of writing agent code first and testing it later, teams define runtime episodes, failure taxonomies, gates, and evidence contracts first, then let implementation converge toward measurable behavior.

dynamic-harnessharness-driven-developmentagent-engineeringruntime-governanceevaluation-harness
EngineeringMarch 8, 202630 min read

MARIA OS Evaluation Harness: A Standard Testing Infrastructure for Measuring Agent Quality

Formal test categories, composite scoring, and continuous evaluation pipelines that transform agent quality from subjective assessment into reproducible engineering measurement

Agent quality cannot be managed if it cannot be measured. Traditional software testing verifies deterministic input-output mappings, but AI agents operate in stochastic, multi-step decision spaces where correctness is contextual, safety is probabilistic, and governance compliance is structural. This paper introduces the MARIA OS Evaluation Harness — a standardized testing infrastructure that defines four test categories (correctness, safety, performance, governance compliance), four primary metrics (decision accuracy, gate compliance rate, evidence quality score, latency under load), and a formal composite scoring framework. We present the harness architecture comprising a test runner, scenario generator, oracle comparator, and regression detector, all scoped through MARIA coordinates for hierarchical test targeting. We prove that the composite agent score is monotonically responsive to genuine quality improvements and demonstrate that continuous evaluation pipelines catch 94.7% of quality regressions before production deployment.

evaluation-harnessagent-qualitytestingbenchmarksagentic-company