mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Test Coverage Analysis of Agentic Pull Requests

arXiv 2607.18057 ↗First posted 20 Jul 2026cs.SEcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

AI coding agents increasingly submit complete pull requests (PRs) with minimal human intervention, shifting software development from AI-assisted to autonomous workflows. As these agents become more prevalent, ensuring the code they generate is adequately tested, by existing tests or by tests the agents write, is critical to preventing regressions, yet little is known about testing in agentic PRs. To address this gap, we analyze 4882 agent-generated PRs from the AIDev dataset (532 Java and 4350 Python PRs) produced by five coding agents. We study (i) how often agents include test changes and (ii) how well covered are code changes by existing and agent-written tests. Agents include test changes in only 49.6% of PRs that change code under test files. Existing tests provide an incomplete safety net: they cover 61.5% of agents' changed executable lines in Java and only 27.0% in Python, where 64.8% of PRs have no changed line executed by any existing test. Agent-written tests improve coverage over existing tests, but only in a minority of PRs: 35.9% of Java and 22.5% of Python Code + Tests PRs show a coverage gain. Across both languages, error-handling constructs (e.g., try and catch blocks) are the most consistently under-tested, with miss rates reaching 86.0% in Java and 81.0% in Python. These findings motivate coverage-aware development practices, coverage feedback loops for coding agents, and evaluation benchmarks that measure test quality to better help agents reliably test their own code.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 10 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2026.

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10 of 28 references.

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  1. 2025On the Use of Agentic Coding: An Empirical Study of Pull Requests on GitHub18 Sep
  2. 2024SWT-Bench: Testing and Validating Real-World Bug-Fixes with Code Agents18 Jun

Other references · 8

  1. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
  2. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,373
  3. 2024Automated Unit Test Improvement using Large Language Models at Metacited by 75
  4. 2023On the Robustness of Code Generation Techniques: An Empirical Study on GitHub Copilotcited by 64
  5. 2024Code-Aware Prompting: A study of Coverage Guided Test Generation in Regression Setting using LLMcited by 64
  6. 2024Using AI-Based Coding Assistants in Practice: State of Affairs, Perceptions, and Ways Forwardcited by 45
  7. 2024CoverUp: Effective High Coverage Test Generation for Pythoncited by 38
  8. 2023An Empirical Study of Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Machine Learning Softwarecited by 5

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  5. 2026Beyond Bug Fixes: An Empirical Investigation of Post-Merge Code Quality Issues in Agent-Generated Pull Requests
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