This course is designed for software engineers and ML practitioners aiming to advance from building LLM prototypes to deploying robust, production-grade AI systems. In the real world, a reliable application requires more than a clever prompt; it demands a rigorous software engineering foundation to ensure its testability, maintainability, and safety. This course provides that critical toolkit.

Testing and Refining LLM Applications
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Testing and Refining LLM Applications
This course is part of LLM Engineering That Works: Prompting, Tuning, and Retrieval Specialization

Instructor: Professionals from the Industry
Included with
Recommended experience
What you'll learn
Apply TDD to microservice endpoints and refactor modules based on code reviews to improve readability and reduce complexity.
Develop behavior and safety tests to ensure LLM outputs comply with policies and block unsafe changes to the model.
Apply data versioning to track artifacts and evaluate ML experiment runs to select production-ready models.
Create scripts using Python's argparse to automate multi-step computational workflows in cloud environments.
Details to know

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March 2026
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There are 5 modules in this course
Rapid AI development often creates "technical debt," resulting in brittle, costly systems. This module shifts focus from basic scripts to professional software engineering for production-grade microservices. You will master Test-Driven Development (TDD), writing unit tests first to ensure reliability. The curriculum emphasizes code reviews and systematic refactoring, teaching you to transform monolithic code into clean, maintainable modules. Through hands-on VS Code labs, you will refactor legacy services and build new API endpoints, gaining the skills to deliver scalable, robust, and professional AI applications.
What's included
4 videos2 readings2 assignments2 ungraded labs
As AI models like Google's Gemini have shown, even the most advanced systems can have spectacular safety failures, leading to brand damage and a loss of user trust. This module teaches you the rigorous, adversarial testing methodologies that professional AI Red Teams use to secure high-stakes applications. By the end of this module, you will be able to not only ensure your LLM behaves safely but also prove that the tests verifying that safety are themselves comprehensive and robust.
What's included
4 videos2 readings3 assignments2 ungraded labs
If you have ever faced the "it worked on my machine" problem or struggled to reproduce a great result from weeks ago, this course will provide you with the foundational MLOps practices to build a truly auditable and collaborative workflow. The primary goal is to empower you to manage the entire experiment lifecycle with confidence, ensuring that every model you build is reproducible, traceable, and ready for the rigors of production. For learners interested in applying these MLOps skills to the next frontier, this module serves as a perfect foundation for more advanced topics.
What's included
5 videos3 readings6 assignments1 ungraded lab
Modern ML workflows often involve multiple complex steps—provisioning a GPU, running a training job, and saving the model—all of which are inefficient to perform by hand. This module teaches you how to automate this entire process from end to end using Python. By the end, you will be equipped to transform your manual cloud processes into robust, automated pipelines ready for production.
What's included
3 videos2 readings2 assignments1 ungraded lab
In this module, you will take on the role of an engineer responsible for ensuring an AI-powered summarization microservice is safe and reliable. Through a hands-on project, you’ll use Python and pytest to build a comprehensive test suite that validates functionality and enforces safety policies. You will write unit tests to confirm the API’s core behavior and then develop critical behavioral tests to ensure the service refuses to generate harmful, illicit, or otherwise non-compliant content. This module will equip you with the practical skills to assert safety refusals, document your test strategy, and integrate your work into a CI pipeline to prevent unsafe code from ever reaching production.
What's included
2 readings1 assignment
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Frequently asked questions
This course assumes basic knowledge of Python and unit testing. It includes step‑by‑step labs for TDD and test automation; however, learners new to testing may want a short introduction to unit tests before starting.
You will use Python testing frameworks (unit tests and behavior test setups), mutation testing tools, DVC for data/model versioning, experiment tracking tools (e.g., W&B), and standard CLI scripting with argparse. CI/CD concepts and integration examples are included as well.
The course builds a repeatable engineering workflow: test-first development, safety and mutation testing to ensure guardrails, versioned datasets and tracked experiments to support model promotion, and automated scripts that fit within the CI/CD pipelines to prevent unsafe or untested deployments.
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¹ Some assignments in this course are AI-graded. For these assignments, your data will be used in accordance with Coursera's Privacy Notice.





