MSR 2026
Mon 13 - Tue 14 April 2026 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
co-located with ICSE 2026

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 14 Apr 2026 11:50 - 12:00 at Oceania V - Session 1-A: AI & Autonomous Agents

Coding agents have received significant adoption in software development recently. Unlike traditional LLM-based code completion tools, coding agents work with autonomy (e.g., invoking external tools) and leave visible traces in software repositories, such as authoring commits. Among their tasks, coding agents may autonomously generate software tests; however, the quality of these tests remains uncertain. In particular, excessive use of mocking can make tests harder to understand and maintain. This paper presents the first study to investigate the presence of mocks in agentgenerated tests of real-world software systems. We analyzed over 1.2 million commits made in 2025 in 2,168 TypeScript, JavaScript, and Python repositories, including 48,563 commits by coding agents, 169,361 commits that modify tests, and 44,900 commits that add mocks to tests. Overall, we find that coding agents are more likely to modify tests and to add mocks to tests than non-coding agents. We detect that (1) 60% of the repositories with agent activity also contain agent test activity; (2) 23% of commits made by coding agents add/change test files, compared with 13% by non-agents; (3) 68% of the repositories with agent test activity also contain agent mock activity; (4) 36% of commits made by coding agents add mocks to tests, compared with 26% by non-agents; and (5) repositories created recently contain a higher proportion of test and mock commits made by agents. Finally, we conclude by discussing implications for developers and researchers. We call attention to the fact that tests with mocks may be potentially easier to generate automatically (but less effective at validating real interactions), and the need to include guidance on mocking practices in agent configuration files.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 14 Apr

Displayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change

11:00 - 12:30
Session 1-A: AI & Autonomous AgentsTechnical Papers / MSR Program at Oceania V
11:00
10m
Talk
Speed at the Cost of Quality: How Cursor AI Increases Short-Term Velocity and Long-Term Complexity in Open-Source Projects
Technical Papers
Hao He Carnegie Mellon University, Courtney Miller Carnegie Mellon University, Shyam Agarwal Carnegie Mellon University, Christian Kästner Carnegie Mellon University, Bogdan Vasilescu Carnegie Mellon University
Pre-print
11:10
10m
Talk
LLM-Based Detection of Tangled Code Changes for Higher-Quality Method-Level Bug Datasets
Technical Papers
Md Nahidul Islam Opu University of Manitoba, Shaowei Wang University of Manitoba, Shaiful Chowdhury University of Manitoba
Pre-print
11:20
10m
Talk
Adversarial Bug Reports as a Security Risk in Language Model-Based Automated Program Repair
Technical Papers
Piotr Przymus Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, Andreas Happe TU Wien, Jürgen Cito TU Wien
Pre-print
11:30
10m
Talk
Investigating Autonomous Agent Contributions in the Wild: Activity Patterns and Code Change over Time
Technical Papers
Răzvan Mihai Popescu Delft University of Technology, David Gros University of California, Davis, Andrei Botocan Delft University of Technology, Rahul Pandita GitHub, Inc., Prem Devanbu University of California at Davis, Maliheh Izadi Delft University of Technology
11:40
10m
Talk
Evaluating the Use of LLMs for Automated DOM-Level Resolution of Web Performance Issues
Technical Papers
Gideon Peters Concordia University, SayedHassan Khatoonabadi Concordia University, Emad Shihab Concordia University
11:50
10m
Talk
Are Coding Agents Generating Over-Mocked Tests? An Empirical Study
Technical Papers
Andre Hora UFMG, Romain Robbes CNRS, LaBRI, University of Bordeaux
Pre-print
12:00
10m
Talk
Consistent or Sensitive? Automated Code Revision Tools Against Semantics-Preserving Perturbations
Technical Papers
Shirin Pirouzkhah University of Zurich, Souhaila Serbout University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, Alberto Bacchelli IfI, University of Zurich
Pre-print
12:10
10m
Talk
Beyond the Prompt: An Empirical Study of Cursor Rules
Technical Papers
Shaokang Jiang University of California, Irvine, Daye Nam University of California, Irvine
Pre-print
12:20
10m
Talk
Bridging Design and Implementation: A Study of Multi-Agent LLM Architectures for Automated Front-End Generation
Technical Papers
Caren Rizk Concordia University, SayedHassan Khatoonabadi Concordia University, Emad Shihab Concordia University