Coding agents are increasingly deployed for end-to-end software engineering tasks, where a readily available oracle evaluator that defines the success criteria is often absent. This motivates verifications for coding agents that can reliably judge and explain their behavior. However, verification is non-trivial as coding agents are increasingly capable of solving long-horizon software engineering tasks. Their execution trajectories can be extremely long, containing hundreds of iterative interactions with code repositories and external tools. Existing verifiers either rely on general-purpose LLMs without specialized training or train dedicated critics that predominantly focus on producing scalar rewards, highlighting the relatively limited exploration of training-based generalist verification. We introduce SWE-Critix, a post-training pipeline for training generalist verifiers of coding-agent trajectories. Given a task and its execution trajectory, the learned verifier predicts the completion label and generates a natural-language analysis that explains its judgment. Our pipeline combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL) and trains a series of 30B models on trajectories from CodeForge-Preview. On a held-out test set, SWE-Critix improves classification accuracy from 57% for the base Qwen3-30B-A3B reasoning model to 66% after SFT and 78% after RL. We release our models, datasets, and training code to facilitate further research.
This publication proposes a definition and a classification of agile software development approaches and analyses ten software development methods that can be characterized as being "agile" against the defined criterion.
P. Abrahamsson, O. Salo, Jussi Ronkainen et al.· arXiv.org· 727 citations· ⚡54
The study shows that agile practices improve both informal and formal communication, but indicates that, in larger development situations involving multiple external stakeholders, a mismatch of adequate communication mechanisms can sometimes even hinder the communication.
M. Pikkarainen, Jukka Haikara, O. Salo et al.· Empirical Software Engineeri...· 401 citations· ⚡48
The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.
Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· Information and Software Tec...· 394 citations· ⚡54
The results show that the embedded industry has been able to apply agile methods in its development processes and that the appreciation of the agile methods and their individual practices appears to increase once adopted and applied in practice.
O. Salo, P. Abrahamsson· IET Software· 238 citations· ⚡9
Consequences of happiness and unhappiness that are beneficial and detrimental for developers' mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts are found.
D. Graziotin, Fabian Fagerholm, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 236 citations· ⚡13
The Mobile-D approach is briefly outlined here and the experiences gained from four case studies are discussed, which helped develop an agile development approach for mobile application development.
P. Abrahamsson, Antti Hanhineva, H. Hulkko et al.· Conference on Object-Oriente...· 225 citations· ⚡18
Machine-learning networks can learn without detailed instructions from a designer. Those that do may offer insight into how the brain reorganizes itself during learning.
Microsoft Research Blog· microsoft.comOct 12, 2026
StudentSim is a research system for evaluating and improving AI tutoring tools before they are tested with learners. It models how individuals may engage with tutors, giving feedback to improve tutor performance across subjects like chess, writing, and mathematics. The post Simulating student learning for better AI tutoring appeared first on Microsoft Research.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduOct 6, 2026