Second Workshop on Future Debugging TechniquesDEBT 2024

While debugging is an integral activity of the software development cycle, mainstream tools used for debugging have hardly evolved with the vast programming language and hardware advances we have witnessed in the past decades. Even though debugging support has found its way into mainstream IDEs, the techniques used for debugging remain largely based on techniques for programs running on the hardware of the past century. Modern software is mostly concurrent and/or distributed and runs on clusters, multicore machines, microcontrollers, etc. Surprisingly, little research has been spent on developing debuggers that deal with these modern programming paradigms. The current lack of appropriate tools makes debugging extremely time-consuming. For example, a 2017 Cambridge study showed that the costs of debugging, testing, and verification of software have an estimated impact of 50 to 70% of the total budget in software development projects.

This workshop aims to gather researchers from all areas in the field of programming languages to discuss novel ideas and define better debugging techniques and tools for the future. We welcome researchers studying dynamic and static debugging techniques to help diagnose the root cause of bugs as well as novel visualisation techniques for debugging.

Call for Papers

DEBT24 is looking to advance state of the art to debug modern software. We welcome researchers from all related areas aimed at helping with the hard task of diagnosing the root cause of bugs, including dynamic and static debugging techniques, online and postmortem debuggers, delta debugging, automatic bug finding, novel visualization techniques for debugging programs, etc.

The workshop aims to gather the community and foster discussion from different perspectives. That is why we seek submissions in the form of papers as well as talks and tool demonstrations.

The workshop is a venue for all approaches to debugging. A non-exclusive list of topics of interest is:

• Debugging techniques, from static to dynamic techniques.
• Innovative visualisation techniques.
• Techniques targeted specific programming models and execution models (e.g. concurrent and parallel programming, microservices, distributed ledgers, web, etc. ) or hardware (e.g. debugging micro-controllers, mobile devices, Big Data applications, etc.).
• Case studies and evaluation of such techniques, e.g. user studies on visualisation tools, debuggers, etc.
• Surveys, taxonomies of bugs and bug patterns, and current practices/uses of debugging approaches.

Workshop Format and Submissions

This workshop welcomes the presentation of new ideas, reflections, emerging problems as well as more mature work. We plan to schedule enough time between presentations to foster discussions of work. To this end, we invite three kinds of submissions:

• Technical papers, up to 12 pages.
• Work-in-progress papers on ideas in early stages, from 2 to 6 pages.
• Talks and tool demonstrations, 1-2 page abstract.

All papers must be written in English and follow the new ACM Master Article Template with the sigconf option.