Maya Bennett
IBM Research has introduced ScarfBench, an open benchmark designed to evaluate how well AI agents handle enterprise Java framework migration. The benchmark reveals that configuration and runtime dependencies are the biggest obstacles, not code translation.
Recent advances in coding agents have sparked excitement around AI-assisted modernization. But an important question remains: Can AI agents reliably modernize real-world enterprise applications?
Existing software engineering benchmarks have shown impressive progress in bug fixing and code generation, but framework migration presents a fundamentally different challenge. Success requires not only translating code, but also preserving behavior, adapting build systems, and navigating runtime dependencies.
To address this gap, IBM Research created ScarfBench (Self-Contained Application Refactoring Benchmark), an open benchmark for evaluating AI agents on cross-framework migration tasks in Enterprise Java. ScarfBench focuses on migrations across three major Java ecosystems: Spring, Jakarta EE, and Quarkus.
Unlike traditional benchmarks that compare generated code against reference implementations, ScarfBench evaluates whether migrated applications actually build, deploy, and preserve behavior.
Why Migration Is Hard
Framework migration is much more than replacing annotations. A simple repository migration can require changes across dependency injection, persistence configuration, queries, and framework descriptors. Small mistakes in any of these pieces can prevent successful deployment.
Figure: Spring ā Jakarta Migration Example
Framework migration requires translating framework semantics, not just source code.
Introducing ScarfBench
ScarfBench provides a systematic way to evaluate AI agents on enterprise Java framework migration tasks. Applications are required to build successfully, deploy correctly, and pass behavioral validation. This provides a much more realistic measure of modernization quality.
The benchmark includes both focused migration tasks and whole-application migrations.
Figure: ScarfBench Construction Pipeline
Starting from a JSR-based enterprise Java taxonomy, expert migrations create verified implementations across Spring, Jakarta EE, and Quarkus.
How Do Frontier Agents Perform?
IBM Research evaluated several state-of-the-art coding agents on ScarfBench. Despite strong performance on traditional software engineering benchmarks, framework migration remains difficult. Success rates vary considerably across framework pairs, and whole-application migrations remain particularly challenging.
Figure: Current Leaderboard
Figure: Compile ā Deploy ā Test Progression
Compile success consistently exceeds deploy success, which in turn exceeds behavioral success. Build success alone significantly overestimates migration quality.
Figure: Migration Outcomes by Target Framework
Migration difficulty depends strongly on the target framework, with Jakarta EE proving particularly challenging.
What We Learned About AI Agents for Java Modernization
Beyond measuring success rates, ScarfBench helps understand how agents behave during modernization.
Can Agents Reliably Tell When a Migration Is Complete?
A migrated application is only useful if it actually builds and runs. IBM Research compared agent-reported outcomes against independent build verification.
"Claude Code reported successful builds for 29 out of 30 whole applications. Only 22 of those applications actually built successfully. Meanwhile, the single application classified as failed by the agent ultimately built correctly."
ā IBM Research
This suggests that agent self-assessment should not be treated as a reliable signal of migration completion. Independent build and test validation remains essential.
How Do Agents Navigate Application Dependencies?
Framework migrations rarely affect a single file or layer. Changes in configuration, services, databases, and web components often cascade across the application.
The most frequently visited layers were configuration, web, database, and service. Common transitions included configuration ā web and service ā database. This suggests that migration is an iterative dependency-resolution process rather than a simple source-to-source transformation.
Where Do Agents Spend Most of Their Effort?
Using layer revisit frequency as a proxy for migration effort, researchers found that configuration dominates migration effort. Rather than proceeding linearly, agents repeatedly returned to configuration-related artifacts while resolving framework differences and dependency issues.
What Challenges Are Not About Code Transformation?
Not every migration issue originates from source code. Agents frequently struggled with environmental issues, including Docker cache inconsistencies, port connectivity problems, and Maven wrapper and build tooling issues. These operational concerns often delayed validation even when the source-code migration itself was largely complete.
Figure: Failure Mode Distribution
Modernization failures span build systems, deployment environments, dependency injection, databases, endpoints, assertions, and infrastructure.
Key Takeaway
The biggest challenge in framework modernization is not translating Java code. It is managing the web of dependencies across configuration, infrastructure, and runtime environments. While frontier agents can automate substantial portions of the migration process, reliable validation and architectural reasoning remain critical for achieving successful outcomes.
ScarfBench helps expose these challenges and provides a standardized way to measure progress toward truly autonomous application modernization.
Explore ScarfBench
ScarfBench is designed as an open resource for researchers and practitioners. Resources include a benchmark dataset, evaluation infrastructure, public leaderboard, documentation, and open-source code. Researchers can compare agent architectures and techniques. Practitioners can use ScarfBench to evaluate modernization solutions before deploying them in production environments.
- Website: https://scarfbench.info
- Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ibm-research/ScarfBench
- Space: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ibm-research/ScarfBench
- GitHub Repository: https://github.com/scarfbench/scarfbench
- Leaderboard: https://scarfbench.info/leaderboard
- Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06754
Framework migration remains one of the largest unsolved problems in AI-assisted software engineering. IBM Research hopes ScarfBench helps the community measure progress and accelerate the next generation of AI-assisted application modernization. The team invites researchers, practitioners, and framework authors to contribute and help push the boundaries of what AI agents can achieve in enterprise software modernization.
