SWE-Gate: Passing Functional Tests Is Not Enough for Software Engineering Agents

Abstract:Repository-level software engineering benchmarks have significantly advanced the evaluation of coding agents, but existing benchmarks primarily measure whether generated patches pass functional tests and overlook review-derived acceptance constraints (review constraints) that often influence whether a patch is acceptable in real-world software development. We introduce SWE-Gate, a repository-level benchmark for software engineering agents that explicitly evaluates review constraint compliance alongside functional correctness. SWE-Gate derives review constraints from real pull request review comments and synthesizes repository-level repair instances around these constraints. Each instance provides separate functional and constraint tests, together with non-compliant and gold patches, enabling explicit separation between issue resolution capability and review constraint compliance. We construct SWE-Gate with 303 repository-level repair instances spanning 75 open-source Python repositories across diverse software domains. Experiments with four LLM backends spanning different capability levels under a common coding-agent scaffold reveal a substantial gap between functional success and success under the complete repair specification: among 644 repairs that pass the functional tests, 221 fail to satisfy the provided review constraints. These findings show that functional-only evaluation overestimates agents' ability to satisfy the full requirements of repository-level repair tasks. The replication package including code, data, and experimental results is available at this https URL.

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.04167 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2609.04167v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.04167 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.