  In this work, we report our efforts to advance the standard operation
procedure of developing Large Language Models (LLMs) or LLMs-based systems or
services in industry. We introduce the concept of Large Language Model
Development Lifecycle (LDLC) and then highlight the importance of consistency
test in ensuring the delivery quality. The principled solution of consistency
test, however, is usually overlooked by industrial practitioners and not urgent
in academia, and current practical solutions are insufficiently rigours and
labor-intensive. We thus propose a simple yet effective consistency test
protocol, named SimCT. SimCT is mainly to proactively check the consistency
across different development stages of "bare metal" LLMs or associated services
without accessing the model artifacts, in an attempt to expedite the delivery
by reducing the back-and-forth alignment communications among multiple teams
involved in different development stages.
  Specifically, SimCT encompasses response-wise and model-wise tests. We
implement the protocol with LightGBM and Student's t-test for two components
respectively, and perform extensive experiments to substantiate the
effectiveness of SimCT and the involved components.
