Submission deadline extended to September 15, 2013.
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. While manual debugging is quickly becoming impractical, techniques that claim to automatically locate a fault have not matured to the desired level of accuracy and consistency. Among the obstacles that developers must 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 will not introduce even 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, and the high performance cost of dynamic techniques. Studies are underway to resolve these problems, but researchers often rely on unrealistic assumptions or use subject programs that do not accurately reflect large-scale industrial software. Practitioners question whether such research proposals can add much value to their work.
The goal of this workshop is to highlight the most pressing challenges and innovative solutions associated with program debugging, especially with respect to methodologies, techniques, and environments. Experience reports from the industry or empir-ical studies on these three aspects are also 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:


for large scale real-life applications














Proceedings and Journal Special Issue
At least one author of each accepted paper (including panelists' position statements) must register with the full fee and present at the workshop in order to be included in the ISSRE 2013 Supplemental Proceedings. Papers will also be submitted to the IEEE Xplore database and indexed by all the abstracting and indexing partners (such as the EI Compendex). Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version to a journal special issue.
Best Paper Award
Two papers were tied for the Best Paper
award! Congratulations to:
Call For Panelists
There will be a special
panel on Program Debugging: Transitioning from Research to Practice at the workshop.
Qualified panelists are solicited to report their experience of applying research
methodologies and techniques to debug large and complex real-life software systems and the
challenges that they had to overcome. Interested parties should send a one-page position
statement to the Program Chairs, who will make the final decision on the panelists to be
invited.
Special thanks to our panelists
(Alex Groce,
Michael Grottke, and
Franz Wotawa)
and the audience for the fantastic discussion!
Click
here for the audio
(thanks to Artur Andrzejak).
If it takes too long to load, right click on the link and select "Save as" instead.
Important Dates
September 15, 2013 (extended) | Submission deadline |
September 25, 2013 (extended) | Notification of authors |
October 1, 2013 | Camera-ready |
Submissions
Submit original papers (not published or submitted elsewhere) with a maximum of 6 pages. Include the title of the paper, the name and affiliation of each author, a 150-word abstract, and up to 6 keywords. Both research papers and industry experience reports are welcome. All the submissions must be written in English, follow the IEEE conference proceedings format, and be uploaded through the workshop submission site. Each submission will be reviewed by three PC members. Paper selection is based on the originality, technical contribution, presentation, and relevance to IWPD.
Steering Committee
W. Eric Wong (chair) | University of Texas at Dallas | USA |
T.H. Tse (chair) | The University of Hong Kong | Hong Kong |
Hira Agrawal | Applied Communication Sciences (formerly Bellcore/Telcordia Technologies) |
USA |
W. K. Chan | City University of Hong Kong | Hong Kong |
James A. Jones | University of California, Irvine | USA |
Franz Wotawa | Graz University of Technology | Austria |
Program Committee Chairs
Raul Santelices | University of Notre Dame | USA |
Zhenyu Zhang | Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences | China |
Program Committee
Rui Abreu | University of Porto | Portugal |
George Baah | MIT Lincoln Laboratory | USA |
T. Y. Chen | Swinburne University of Technology | Australia |
Zhenyu Chen | Nanjing University | China |
Byoungju Choi | Ewha Woman's University | Korea |
James Clause | University of Delaware | USA |
Valentin Dallmeier | Saarland University | Germany |
Gregory Kapfhammer | Allegheny College | USA |
Jenny Li | Kean University | USA |
Wes Masri | American University of Beirut | Lebanon |
Wolfgang Mayer | University of South Australia | Australia |
Bruce McMillin | Missouri University of Science and Technology | USA |
Andy Podgurski | Case Western Reserve University | USA |
Markus Stumptner | University of South Australia | Australia |
William Sumner | Simon Fraser University | Canada |
Franz Wotawa | Graz University of Technology | Austria |
Dianxiang Xu | Dakota State University | USA |
Web Master
Shou-Yu Lee | University of Texas at Dallas | USA |
Workshop Venue
IWPD 2013 will be held in conjunction with ISSRE 2013 at Pasadena, CA. Please visit the ISSRE website for further information.
Main Contact:
Professor W. Eric Wong
MS EC 31
Department of Computer Science
University of Texas at Dallas
800 West Campbell Road
Richardson, Texas 75080, USA
Tel.: (972) 883-6619/Fax: (972) 883-2399
Email: ewong(at)utdallas.edu
For any inquiry, please contact the Program Chair, co-Chair, or Steering Committee.
Previous IWPD



Audio and Video
Special thanks to Artur Andrzejak for the audio recordings!
Presentation (audio and/or video) | Slides | |
---|---|---|
Paper 1 | Cues for Scent Intensification in Debugging | slides |
Paper 2 | Bug localisation through diverse sources of information | slides |
Paper 3 | Coincidental Correctness an Interference or Interface to Successful Fault Localization (YouTube) | slides |
Paper 4 | Scalable Isolation of Failure-Inducing Changes (no audio available) | slides |
Paper 5 | Improving the Accuracy of Static Analysis Based on State Partition (YouTube) | slides |
Paper 6 | Automated Diagnosis of Software Misconfigurations Based on Static Analysis | slides |
Paper 7 | Program Behavior Characterization and Clustering - An Empirical Study for Failure Clustering | slides |
Paper 8 | An Empirical Study on Clustering for Isolating Bugs in Fault Localization | slides |
Paper 9 | Mutation-based spreadsheet debugging | slides |
Panel | Program Debugging: Transitioning from Research to Practice |