Agents in Software Engineering: Survey, Landscape, and Vision

Understand

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success and have been widely used in various downstream tasks, especially in the tasks of the software engineering (SE) field.

• We find that many studies combining LLMs with SE have employed the concept of agents either explicitly or implicitly.
• However, there is a lack of an in-depth survey to sort out the development context of existing works, analyze how existing works combine the LLM-based agent technologies to optimize various tasks, and clarify the framework of LLM-based agents in SE.
• In this paper, we conduct the first survey of the studies on combining LLM-based agents with SE and present a framework of LLM-based agents in SE which includes three key modules: perception, memory, and action.