Surveys answer the big science questions, but they are trickier than one might think. Designing a survey requires careful planning fraught with technical limitations, uncontrolled variables, and implicit sample biasing. Analyzing a large number of individual quasar spectra presents many challenges. In this chapter, we outline the fundamental attributes of a survey, which define its breadth, depth, and completeness over the domain of the survey space. Large surveys require automated algorithms for objectively identifying absorption lines; their success rates for finding true absorption and erroneously identifying false positives must be both objectively and subjectively assessed. We outline a comprehensive strategy, including automated routines, human inspection, and Monte Carlo simulations, for obtaining the best estimate of the number of true absorbers in the spectra. Other key quantities include the redshift path sensitivity and the total redshift sensitivity path of the survey. These can be computed in binned survey subspaces (redshift, etc.) and will be central to estimating absorption population statistics. We conclude with a summary of these complex survey assessment methods.