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:
Bibkey:
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)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1618.pdf
Checklist:
 2026.acl-long.1618.checklist.pdf