English

ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development

Software Engineering 2024-06-06 v5 Computation and Language Multiagent Systems

Abstract

Software development is a complex task that necessitates cooperation among multiple members with diverse skills. Numerous studies used deep learning to improve specific phases in a waterfall model, such as design, coding, and testing. However, the deep learning model in each phase requires unique designs, leading to technical inconsistencies across various phases, which results in a fragmented and ineffective development process. In this paper, we introduce ChatDev, a chat-powered software development framework in which specialized agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are guided in what to communicate (via chat chain) and how to communicate (via communicative dehallucination). These agents actively contribute to the design, coding, and testing phases through unified language-based communication, with solutions derived from their multi-turn dialogues. We found their utilization of natural language is advantageous for system design, and communicating in programming language proves helpful in debugging. This paradigm demonstrates how linguistic communication facilitates multi-agent collaboration, establishing language as a unifying bridge for autonomous task-solving among LLM agents. The code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.07924,
  title  = {ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development},
  author = {Chen Qian and Wei Liu and Hongzhang Liu and Nuo Chen and Yufan Dang and Jiahao Li and Cheng Yang and Weize Chen and Yusheng Su and Xin Cong and Juyuan Xu and Dahai Li and Zhiyuan Liu and Maosong Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.07924},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted to ACL 2024; https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev