The paper introduces ORACLE‑SWE, a study that systematically evaluates how different intermediate information signals—such as Reproduction Test, Regression Test, Edit Location, Execution Context, and API Usage—contribute to the success of language‑model agents on software engineering tasks. It quantifies the impact of both oracle‑provided signals and those extracted by agents, and measures the performance gap between current agent‑found signals and their oracle counterparts. The authors release code and a dataset to support future signal‑analysis research in this area.
By Kenan Li, Qirui Jin, Liao Zhu, Xiaosong Huang, Yijia Wu, Yikai Zhang, Xin Zhang, Zijian Jin, Yufan Huang, Elsie Nallipogu, Chaoyun Zhang, Yu Kang, Saravan Rajmohan, Qingwei Lin, Wenke Lee, Dongmei Zhang
The paper presents a systematic analysis of five state‑of‑the‑art automated program repair agents, tracing their decision‑making across 500 real‑world repair tasks. It finds that while the agents perform well on simple fixes, they struggle with logic‑intensive bugs, often producing verbose, overfitted patches that pass tests without addressing root causes. Key bottlenecks identified include poor test generation, limited regression test selection, and reliance on primitive tooling without access to debuggers or advanced program analysis tools.
By Ira Ceka, Hailie Mitchell, Saurabh Pujar, Luca Buratti, Shyam Ramji, Junfeng Yang, Gail Kaiser, Baishakhi Ray
arXiv:2509. 24148v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a widely adopted practice that requires developers to create and execute tests alongside implementation.
By Yiran Hu, Nan Jiang, Shanchao Liang, Yi Wu, Lin Tan
SWE‑Nexus is a fully automated pipeline that builds repository‑level implementation tasks by analyzing test execution. It uses four construction agents to select tests, trace production function bodies, and generate behavioral specifications, retaining scopes only when all expected scoring points pass and masking the traced bodies triggers failures. The benchmark covers 600 tasks from 105 repositories in six languages, and the best configuration resolves 37.8% of tasks in a single attempt, demonstrating the system’s ability to construct tasks from validated behavior beyond individual code changes.
By Songwei Yu, Ziqi Miao, Jingxuan Xu, Junhao Fan, Haoyang Huang, Yuan Xiong, Zihang Xu, Weihao Li, Wenqiang Zhu, Yuechen Luo, Xinshun Feng, Yanan Wu, Ken Deng
AgentTrustCI is a Java/JUnit 5 framework that turns application‑layer expectations—such as tool selection, grounding of answers, and adherence to workflows—into policy, grounding, and trajectory checks over recorded traces. It provides deterministic replay for repeatable build‑time tests and a judge interface for optional semantic evaluation. In tests across 55 synthetic cases from seven enterprise domains, the full pipeline correctly classified all injected faults and passing controls, while single‑layer configurations handled 35 cases, demonstrating the framework’s coverage and repeatability.
By Sachin Gupta
arXiv:2601.19066v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Bug Reproduction Tests (BRTs) have been used in many Automated Program Repair (APR) systems, primarily for validating fixes and aiding fix ge...
By Runxiang Cheng, Michele Tufano, Jos\'e Cambronero, Renyao Wei, Sherry Shi, Grant Uy, Pat Rondon, Franjo Ivan\v{c}i\'c
SWEPatchTest is a benchmark that evaluates software tests by measuring their ability to reproduce issues, accept correct patches, and reject incorrect ones across 619 tasks and 82,579 candidate patches. It introduces the Joint Validation Rate metric, revealing that even the best configurations only achieve 9.21% success when all three criteria are met. Using these validation scores to select demonstrations for supervised fine‑tuning can roughly triple the Joint Validation Rate and enhance downstream repair performance on multiple SWE‑bench datasets.
By Hua Lu, Pengcheng Wang, Han Li, Zichen Tian, Yanyu Chen, Huang He, Bingjin Chen
The paper analyzes 2,487 tasks from five public coding‑agent benchmarks and 14,922 runs of six agent configurations, introducing the Spread‑Novelty‑Centrality (SNC) profile to describe how reference solutions are distributed, added, and the code’s dependencies, history, and complexity. It finds that every pair of benchmarks differs on at least two SNC axes, even when sharing the same task label, and that resolved runs tend to involve less distributed changes and lower centrality values, with patch sizes varying between Claude and Qwen configurations. The authors recommend that practitioners choose evaluation tasks based on change characteristics, inspect task descriptions, and assess patch scope alongside test outcomes to better align benchmarks with real‑world workloads.
By Radin Shayanfar, Keheliya Gallaba, Ahmed E. Hassan
arXiv:2606.21804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Maintainability is a core dimension of software engineering, shaping how code is written, reviewed, and developed over time. While coding age...
By Shaswat Patel, Betty Li Hou, Arun Purohit, Kai Xu, Jane Pan, He He, Valerie Chen
arXiv:2607. 28591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling coding agents requires a continuing supply of executable data for training, benchmarking, and continuous evaluation.
By Haomin Qi, Xingliang Wang, Xuanqi Gao, Baihui Sang, Xin Zhang, Minghua Ma, Pengfei Gao, Yu Kang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
arXiv:2609.36635v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Bug validation asks a coding agent to produce an executable witness for a reported bug. The witness combines a concrete input with a testing harness...
By Haomin Qi, Xiangzhe Xu, Yiming Huang, Jingbo Shang, Chengpeng Wang
arXiv:2607. 02469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software tests and code evolve together: a code change should be followed by new or updated tests that record the new software behavior.
By Jiale Amber Wang, Kaiyuan Wang, Pengyu Nie