mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Doc2Feat-Bench: Evaluating Documentation-Driven Feature Addition

arXiv 2507.18130 ↗First posted 24 Jul 2025cs.SEcited by 16

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Documentation changes in mature software projects often describe newly introduced or modified behavior. This makes them a natural basis for documentation-driven feature addition, where software engineering agents implement features from public-facing documentation updates. However, existing benchmarks for agentic software development primarily rely on issue reports written for maintainer coordination and often contain implementation-level details. Motivated by this observation, this work introduces Doc2Feat-bench, a benchmark for documentation-driven feature addition. Doc2Feat-bench consists of 634 tasks across 10 mature open-source software projects, involving about 114k code changes in total. Each task pairs a documentation change with the corresponding implementation and developer-written tests, enabling evaluation of whether a software engineering agent can implement the feature described by the documentation diff. The benchmark is constructed through a five-phase pipeline, starting from release notes, and offers broad coverage across libraries, developer tools, and frameworks while preserving real-world development settings. To facilitate lightweight and reliable evaluation under limited resources, we further curate a human-validated subset named Doc2Feat-bench Verified. It contains 114 high-quality instances whose task clarity and evaluation validity are manually verified. We use Doc2Feat-bench to assess a range of state-of-the-art software engineering agents with two widely used scaffolds. Experimental results show that despite significant token consumption, the best task success rate remains as low as 37.72% (OpenHands with Qwen3-Coder-480B). Our analysis reveals that software engineering agents face key challenges in performing cross-file edits, understanding existing code modules, and correctly interpreting documentation semantics.

Key facts. Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. First posted on arXiv 24 Jul 2025.

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Citing papers per year: 2025: 6; 2026: 10.

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  1. 2026FeatureBench: Benchmarking Agentic Coding for Complex Feature Development
  2. 2026RACE-Bench: A Reasoning-Augmented Benchmark for Repository-Level Code Agents on Feature Addition
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  4. 2026SkillScriptBench: Benchmarking Self-Evolution of Executable Agent Skill Packages Beyond Markdown
  5. 2026SWE Atlas: Benchmarking Coding Agents Beyond Issue Resolution
  6. 2026DocSync: Agentic Documentation Maintenance via Critic-Guided Reflexion
  7. 2026What Does an Agentic Software Engineering Benchmark Measure? Profiling Task Demands and Agent Behaviour Beyond What Category Labels Reveal
  8. 2026Change2Task: From Repository Changes to Executable Coding Agent Tasks and Environments