Issue2Test: Generating Reproducing Test Cases from Issue Reports

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nashid, Noor, Bouzenia, Islem, Pradel, Michael, Mesbah, Ali
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nashid, Noor
Bouzenia, Islem
Pradel, Michael
Mesbah, Ali
author_facet Nashid, Noor
Bouzenia, Islem
Pradel, Michael
Mesbah, Ali
contents Automated tools for solving GitHub issues are receiving significant attention by both researchers and practitioners, e.g., in the form of foundation models and LLM-based agents prompted with issues. A crucial step toward successfully solving an issue is creating a test case that accurately reproduces the issue. Such a test case can guide the search for an appropriate patch and help validate whether the patch matches the issue's intent. However, existing techniques for issue reproduction show only moderate success. This paper presents Issue2Test, an LLM-based technique for automatically generating a reproducing test case for a given issue report. Unlike automated regression test generators, which aim at creating passing tests, our approach aims at a test that fails, and that fails specifically for the reason described in the issue. To this end, Issue2Test performs three steps: (1) understand the issue and gather context (e.g., related files and project-specific guidelines) relevant for reproducing it; (2) generate a candidate test case; and (3) iteratively refine the test case based on compilation and runtime feedback until it fails and the failure aligns with the problem described in the issue. We evaluate Issue2Test on the SWT-bench-lite dataset, where it successfully reproduces 32.9% of the issues, achieving a 16.3% relative improvement over the best existing technique. Our evaluation also shows that Issue2Test reproduces 20 issues that four prior techniques fail to address, contributing a total of 60.4% of all issues reproduced by these tools. We envision our approach to contribute to enhancing the overall progress in the important task of automatically solving GitHub issues.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_16320
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Issue2Test: Generating Reproducing Test Cases from Issue Reports
Nashid, Noor
Bouzenia, Islem
Pradel, Michael
Mesbah, Ali
Software Engineering
Automated tools for solving GitHub issues are receiving significant attention by both researchers and practitioners, e.g., in the form of foundation models and LLM-based agents prompted with issues. A crucial step toward successfully solving an issue is creating a test case that accurately reproduces the issue. Such a test case can guide the search for an appropriate patch and help validate whether the patch matches the issue's intent. However, existing techniques for issue reproduction show only moderate success. This paper presents Issue2Test, an LLM-based technique for automatically generating a reproducing test case for a given issue report. Unlike automated regression test generators, which aim at creating passing tests, our approach aims at a test that fails, and that fails specifically for the reason described in the issue. To this end, Issue2Test performs three steps: (1) understand the issue and gather context (e.g., related files and project-specific guidelines) relevant for reproducing it; (2) generate a candidate test case; and (3) iteratively refine the test case based on compilation and runtime feedback until it fails and the failure aligns with the problem described in the issue. We evaluate Issue2Test on the SWT-bench-lite dataset, where it successfully reproduces 32.9% of the issues, achieving a 16.3% relative improvement over the best existing technique. Our evaluation also shows that Issue2Test reproduces 20 issues that four prior techniques fail to address, contributing a total of 60.4% of all issues reproduced by these tools. We envision our approach to contribute to enhancing the overall progress in the important task of automatically solving GitHub issues.
title Issue2Test: Generating Reproducing Test Cases from Issue Reports
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16320