Oct 2026· Proceedings of the ACM on software engineering.· 1 citation
Abstract
Recent advances in large language model agents offer the promise of automating end-to-end software development from natural language requirements. However, existing approaches largely adopt linear, waterfall-style pipelines, which oversimplify the iterative nature of real-world development and struggle with complex, larger-scale projects. To address these limitations, we propose EvoDev, an iterative software development framework inspired by feature-driven development. EvoDev decomposes user requirements into a set of user-valued features and constructs a Feature Map, a directed acyclic graph that explicitly models dependencies between features. Each feature node in the feature map maintains multi-layer contexts, including business logic, software design, and code implementation, which are propagated along dependencies to provide context for subsequent development iterations. We evaluate EvoDev on challenging Android development tasks and show that it improves Function Completeness by 57.3% over the best-performing baseline, Claude Code, while achieving 16.0%–58.5% improvements over single-agent baselines with different base LLMs. These results highlight the importance of feature decomposition, dependency modeling, context propagation, and workflow-aware agent design for end-to-end software development. Moreover, our work summarizes practical insights for designing iterative, LLM-driven development frameworks and informs future training of base LLMs to better support iterative software development.
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