# Doc2Feat-Bench: Evaluating Documentation-Driven Feature Addition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18130 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18130/

## 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.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02547/) (2025)
- [When Agents go Astray: Course-Correcting SWE Agents with PRMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02360/) (2025)
- [ContextBench: A Benchmark for Context Retrieval in Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05892/) (2026)
- [SecureVibeBench: Benchmarking Secure Vibe Coding of AI Agents via Reconstructing Vulnerability-Introducing Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22097/) (2025)
- [EvoCode-Bench: Evaluating Coding Agents in Multi-Turn Iterative Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24110/) (2026)
- [FeatBench: Towards More Realistic Evaluation of Feature-level Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22237/) (2025)
- [A Benchmark for Localizing Code and Non-Code Issues in Software Projects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25242/) (2025)
- [DockSmith: Scaling Reliable Coding Environments via an Agentic Docker Builder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00592/) (2026)
- [Repo0: Design-Driven Zero-to-All Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19854/) (2026)
- [Generating High-Quality Datasets for Code Editing via Open-Source Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25203/) (2025)
- [Credit-Budgeted ICPC-Style Coding: When Agents Must Pay for Every Decision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10182/) (2026)
- [Persistent Cross-Attempt State Optimization for Repository-Level Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03632/) (2026)
- [Neurosymbolic Repo-level Code Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16021/) (2026)
- [Evaluating LLM Agents on Automated Software Analysis Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11270/) (2026)
- [SWE-Journey: Towards More Realistic Evaluation of Coding Assistants through Long-Horizon, Multi-Turn Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11559/) (2026)
- [Doc2Harness: Benchmarking LLMs on Long-Horizon Harness Engineering of Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20344/) (2026)

## 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.