8th International Workshop on Program Debugging (IWPD 2017)

Software today is larger and more complex than ever before. Under this circumstance, it is not surprising that the debugging process is becoming more difficult and costly. On the other hand, it presents golden opportunities for researchers to make significant impacts on solving real-world problems. While manual debugging is impractical for large software, techniques that claim to effectively locate a fault have not matured to the desired level of accuracy, consistency, and usability. Developers face many obstacles during the debugging process, such as ambiguities of distinguishing executions in the presence of multiple causative faults, difficulties in reliably recording and replaying failed executions, and uncertainty that bug fixes might introduce even more faults into the software. Furthermore, many existing approaches suffer from critical shortcomings that limit their applicability, including 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 high setup and operating costs. It is very common that researchers 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 related development processes. Therefore, practitioners raise the question of which value research proposals can add to their actual work.
The goal of this workshop 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 industry or empirical studies on these aspects are also welcome. IWPD aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the latest advancements and determine further challenges that must be overcome in the area of program debugging.