Title: Beyond Software Development: Continuous Integration with coding agents
Primary area: infrastructure, software libraries, hardware, systems, etc.
Keywords: Agentic system, software engineering

Abstract: Coding agents are popular aids for software development today. Starting from code completion mechanisms in GitHub co-pilot, they have evolved much beyond programming to be active aids for software development by managing and maintaining a code-base via issue resolution. 
Resolving software issues takes care of program improvement tasks such as bug fixes and feature additions. 
Yet they do not contribute to the integration and operationalization of such changes into a complex software project. 
In this work, we study technical challenges that maintainers will face with integrating AI-generated suggestions such as build-problems and testing software systems.
We compare how a variety of existing software engineering agents can cope with such operationalization and systems integration.  
This includes the open-source agent \texttt{OpenHands}, an existing agent to help in project builds called \texttt{ExecutionAgent}, and USEAgent, a general purpose SE agent ensemble. 
We extend these agents with tooling for environment management to develop solutions for systems integration which can then be experimentally compared. 
Our experimental results suggest that the proposed solution outperforms existing approaches, achieving success on diverse open-source projects evaluated against a standard software engineering research benchmark.
At a broad level, our work contributes in taking the automation offered by AI agents to the next stage of the software lifecycle - from  software development and maintenance to software systems integration.