Tingshuo Liang | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

From Runnable to Shippable: Multi-Agent Test-Driven Development for Generating Full-Stack Web Applications from Requirements

Coding agents can generate runnable web applications, but their outputs frequently fail to satisfy functional requirements. Although test-driven development (TDD) offers a principled repair loop, applying it to web applications requires deriving executable acceptance tests, validating behavior through dynamic browser interactions, and translating observed failures into actionable feedback. We present TDDev, an experimental instrument that automates these tasks and enables closed-loop TDD with minimal human mediation. Using TDDev, we conduct the first controlled study of TDD for full-stack web application generation across 20 diverse web applications, multiple backbone models, two coding agents, and three TDD implementations. With sufficiently capable backbones, TDD improves accuracy by 15.5--23.7 percentage points and remains effective across both minimal and full-featured coding agents; replacing unreliable feedback with a stronger tester restores positive gains for a lower-capability backbone. Incremental TDD provides bounded control, Whole-Project TDD enables coordinated repair and achieves the highest cost efficiency in most configurations, and Agentic TDD performs best with highly capable models. Based on these findings, we provide a practical decision tree that selects an implementation according to model capability, feedback reliability, and deployment objectives. By automating acceptance testing and failure-guided repair, TDDev also reduces the human testing and intervention required during development.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Automatically Generating Web Applications from Requirements Via Multi-Agent Test-Driven Development

Developing full-stack web applications is complex and time-intensive, demanding proficiency across diverse technologies and frameworks. Although recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable automated webpage generation from visual inputs, current solutions remain limited to front-end tasks and fail to deliver fully functional applications. In this work, we introduce TDDev, the first test-driven development (TDD)-enabled LLM-agent framework for end-to-end full-stack web application generation. Given a natural language description or design image, TDDev automatically derives executable test cases, generates front-end and back-end code, simulates user interactions, and iteratively refines the implementation until all requirements are satisfied. Our framework addresses key challenges in full-stack automation, including underspecified user requirements, complex interdependencies among multiple files, and the need for both functional correctness and visual fidelity. Through extensive experiments on diverse application scenarios, TDDev achieves a 14.4% improvement on overall accuracy compared to state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in producing reliable, high-quality web applications without requiring manual intervention.

cs.SE↗