Construct Validity of Coding Benchmarks for LLM-based Agentic Coding Tools

Alexander Berndt, Paul Ralph, Thomas Bach, Sebastian Baltes

Software developers increasingly adopt LLM-based agentic coding tools to assist them with development tasks. To provide developers with up-to-date information on these tools' effectiveness, prior work introduced benchmarks that enable comparisons across tools. Despite the widespread adoption of such benchmarks, however, recent work has shown that they suffer from issues threatening their validity. Aims. In this work, we aim to complement prior work by analyzing the construct validity of agentic coding benchmarks. Methodology. We analyze nine benchmarks commonly used to evaluate the effectiveness of agentic coding tools. We identify the constructs that the benchmarks claim to measure, the metrics used to operationalize them, and potential confounders that interfere with the measurement. Results. Our findings show that benchmarks commonly operationalize broad concepts such as coding capability with only a small set of metrics. The reported attributes that might confound the measurements vary between benchmarks, indicating a lack of standardization. Conclusions. We conclude with recommendations to strengthen construct validity in agentic coding benchmarks and encourage further…