IWPD 2014 - International Workshop on programming debugging

As software today is larger and more complex than ever before, it is not surprising that the debugging process is also much more difficult and costly. Yet, at the same time, this presents golden opportunities for researchers to produce significant impacts on solving real-world problems. While manual debugging is quickly becoming impractical, techniques that claim to effectively locate a fault have not matured to the desired level of accuracy, consistency, and usability. Among the obstacles that developers face during the debugging process are the ambiguity of distinguishing executions in the presence of multiple causative faults, the difficulty in reliably recording and replaying failed executions, and the uncertainty that bug fixes might introduce more faults into the software. Furthermore, many existing approaches suffer from critical shortcomings that limit their applicability, such as the complexity and lack of scalability of formal verification, the imprecision of static analysis, the high performance cost of dynamic techniques, non-productive human-centric debugging environments, and the high setup and operating costs. Studies are underway to resolve these problems, but researchers often rely on simplified assumptions or model their solutions after methods to handle selected subject programs that do not accurately reflect the complexity in large-scale industrial software and its development process. Practitioners question whether such research proposals can add much value to their work.
The goal of IWPD is to highlight the most pressing challenges and innovative solutions associated with program debugging, especially with respect to software business, methodologies, techniques, environments, and human factors. Experience reports from the industry or empirical studies on these aspects are welcome. IWPD will bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the latest advancements and determine further challenges that must be overcome in the area of program debugging.
The workshop welcomes submissions that cover, but are not limited to, the following topics:
Strategies for effective and efficient program debugging
Challenges and emerging techniques in program debugging for
large scale real-life applications and domain-specific applications
Debugging for multi-(core, process, or threaded) programs
Empirical studies and open source-based benchmarking infrastructure
Experience reports and industrial best practices
Impacts of software business, human factors, programming languages,
and tool environments on program debugging
Integrating debugging with other software development and
maintenance activities
Social aspects of program debugging
Software risk analysis and cost estimation for fault localization,
bug fixing, and their social interactions
Transitioning from research to practice
Pedagogical models for effectively teaching program debugging