E2EDev: Benchmarking Large Language Models in End-to-End Software Development Task
Jingyao Liu, Chen Huang, Zhizhao Guan, Wenqiang Lei, Yang Deng
Abstract
The rapid advancement in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated significant potential in End-to-End Software Development (E2ESD). However, existing E2ESD benchmarks are limited by coarse-grained requirement specifications and unreliable evaluation protocols, hindering a true understanding of current framework capabilities. To address these limitations, we present E2EDev, a novel benchmark grounded in the principles of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to assess whether the generated software meets user needs through mimicking real user interactions. E2EDev comprises (i) a fine-grained set of user requirements for each target software project (ii) multiple BDD test scenarios with corresponding Python step implementations for each requirement, and (iii) a fully automated testing pipeline built on the Behave framework. By evaluating various E2ESD frameworks and LLM backbones with E2EDev, our analysis reveals a persistent struggle to effectively solve these tasks, underscoring the critical need for more effective and cost-efficient E2ESD solutions. Our codebase and benchmark are available at https://github.com/SCUNLP/E2EDev.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.1618
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 35032–35068
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1618/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Jingyao Liu, Chen Huang, Zhizhao Guan, Wenqiang Lei, and Yang Deng. 2026. E2EDev: Benchmarking Large Language Models in End-to-End Software Development Task. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 35032–35068, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- E2EDev: Benchmarking Large Language Models in End-to-End Software Development Task (Liu et al., ACL 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1618.pdf