Reliable and Developer-Aligned Evaluation of Agents for Software Engineering

Conference Paper (2026)
Author(s)

Razvan Mihai Popescu (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Research Group
Software Engineering
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1145/3803437.3804877 Final published version
More Info
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Publication Year
2026
Language
English
Research Group
Software Engineering
Pages (from-to)
43-44
Publisher
ACM
ISBN (electronic)
9798400726361
Event
ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE 2026 (2026-07-05 - 2026-07-09), Montreal, Canada
Page Views
31
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Abstract

Large language models are rapidly moving towards closing the development cycle, transitioning from simple assistive companions to autonomous contributors deeply embedded into collaborative development environments. Despite their accelerated adoption, existing evaluation techniques are limited due to their fragmented nature and distorted projection of true model capabilities, often obtained from hypothetical syntactic scenarios. This research aims to bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive evaluation methodology for LLM-powered agents that is grounded in real-world software development practice. Our evaluation approach focuses on contamination-awareness, in-the-wild agentic behavior assessment, and trajectory-aware benchmarks and metrics capturing realistic coding contexts, human-aligned behavior, and model failure modes.