What Does an Agentic Software Engineering Benchmark Measure? Profiling Task Demands and Agent Behaviour Beyond What Category Labels Reveal
Agentic software engineering benchmarks are typically summarized by nominal category labels such as "bug fix" or "feature implementation," yet benchmarks carrying the same label are built through very different curation pipelines. A label thus reveals little about the engineering work a benchmark demands. We introduce the Spread--Novelty--Centrality (SNC) profile, a three-axis characterization of the demands of repository-level coding tasks, grounded in empirical software engineering research. We apply the profile to five widely used benchmarks and 14,922 trajectories of two model families at three scales, and report three findings. (1) A label is an unreliable proxy for task demands, as ...
| Authors | Radin Shayanfar, Keheliya Gallaba, Ahmed E. Hassan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 1 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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