TDFlow: Agentic Workflows for Test Driven Development

TL;DR

TDFlow is a novel test-driven workflow that decomposes software repair into specialized sub-agents, significantly improving test resolution success rates and approaching human-level performance in automated repository repair.

Contribution

Introduces TDFlow, a test-driven agentic workflow with specialized sub-agents for repository-scale software repair, reducing complexity and improving success rates over existing systems.

Findings

Achieves 88.8% pass rate on SWE-Bench Lite, 94.3% on SWE-Bench Verified

Reduces long-context burden on sub-agents, enabling focused task performance

Manual inspection shows minimal test hacking, indicating robustness

Abstract

We introduce TDFlow, a novel test-driven agentic workflow that frames repository-scale software engineering as a test-resolution task, specifically designed to solve human-written tests. Given a set of tests, TDFlow repeatedly proposes, revises, and debugs repository-scale patches using precisely engineered sub-agents and tightly constrained tools. The workflow decomposes software engineering program repair into four components governed by respective sub-agents. This simple, forced decoupling of patch proposing, debugging, patch revision, and optional test generation (1) reduces long-context burden on any individual sub-agent, (2) focuses each sub-agent on specific, pre-defined sub-tasks, and (3) allows for specialized performance improvement on specific sub-tasks. When provided human-written tests, TDFlow attains 88.8% pass rate on SWE-Bench Lite (an absolute improvement of 27.8% over the next best system) and 94.3% on SWE-Bench Verified. Manual inspection of the 800 TDFlow runs within SWE-Bench Lite and Verified uncover only 7 instances of test hacking, which were subsequently counted as failures. Furthermore, we show that the primary obstacle to human-level software engineering performance lies within writing successful reproduction tests. We envision a human-LLM interactive system powered by TDFlow where human developers write tests solved by LLM systems. Together, these results indicate that modern LLMs, when embedded in a narrowly engineered, test-driven workflow, already achieve human-level test resolution -- with the final frontier for fully autonomous repository repair being the accurate generation of valid reproduction tests.