Workshop on Future Debugging Techniques
Several studies have found that developers spend a substantial fraction of their programming time debugging, while often perceiving debuggers as overly complex to use.
Although programming languages, hardware, software architectures, and observability practices have advanced considerably, mainstream debugging tools have evolved much more slowly. Traditional debugging still largely relies on manual analysis of concrete executions, while modern software increasingly involves concurrent and distributed systems, multicore architectures, microservices, and embedded systems. Static and symbolic analyses complement dynamic debugging by reasoning about program behavior without requiring a concrete execution and can support defect detection, exploration of hard-to-reach states, and root-cause analysis.
At the same time, software development is shifting toward AI-supported and increasingly agentic workflows in which AI systems generate, modify, analyze, and repair code. These developments create new challenges and opportunities for debugging, from AI-assisted fault diagnosis to debugging code produced by autonomous agents.
DEBT brings together researchers and practitioners from programming languages, software engineering, systems, program analysis, and visualization to discuss novel debugging techniques and tools. We welcome work on dynamic, static, and symbolic techniques; root-cause analysis; novel debugging and visualization approaches; debugging based on monitoring, telemetry, and observability; emerging execution and programming models; and AI-assisted and agentic software analysis.
Call for Papers
DEBT’27 aims to advance the state of the art in debugging modern software. We welcome researchers and practitioners from all related areas working on the challenging task of understanding failures and diagnosing the root causes of bugs. This includes dynamic, static, symbolic, and hybrid debugging and analysis techniques; online and postmortem debugging; delta debugging; automated bug detection and root-cause analysis; monitoring- and observability-based approaches; novel visualization techniques; and AI-assisted debugging.
The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from programming languages, software engineering, systems, program analysis, and visualization, and to foster discussion across these communities. We therefore 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 includes:
- Debugging and program-analysis techniques, including dynamic, static, symbolic, and hybrid approaches.
- Root-cause analysis, automated bug detection, fault localization, delta debugging, and program repair.
- Innovative visualization and interaction techniques for debugging and program comprehension.
- Debugging based on monitoring, tracing, telemetry, and observability.
- Techniques targeting specific programming and execution models, such as concurrent and parallel programming, distributed systems, microservices, distributed ledgers, and web applications.
- Techniques targeting specific hardware and execution environments, such as microcontrollers, embedded systems, mobile devices, and large-scale computing environments.
- AI-assisted debugging, debugging of AI-generated software, and debugging in agentic software-development workflows.
- Case studies and evaluations of debugging techniques and tools, including controlled experiments and user studies.
- Surveys, taxonomies of bugs and bug patterns, and studies of current debugging practices and tool usage.
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 sufficient time between presentations to foster discussion of the presented work.
To this end, we invite three kinds of submissions:
- Technical papers: up to 8 pages, excluding references.
- Work-in-progress papers: 2–4 pages, presenting ideas in early stages.
- Talks and tool demonstrations: 1–2 page abstract.
For work-in-progress papers and tool demonstrations, please include the type of submission in the title.
Submission Guidelines
Papers must be formatted according to the guidelines for ACM sigplan papers using:
\documentclass[sigplan,screen]{acmart}
See https://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/ for details.
DEBT employs a lightweight double-blind review process. Authors are required to omit their names and identifying information from the submission.
Submissions should be made via EasyChair using the following link: The submission site is not yet enabled.
Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library. Authors will, however, be able to opt out of publication if desired.
At least one author of each accepted submission must register for the workshop, attend the event, present the work, and participate in the discussions.