DEBT 2026

Workshop on Future Debugging Techniques

Several studies since 2017 have found that developers spend up to 60% of their programming time debugging. At the same time, these studies report that developers often perceive debuggers as overly complex to use. While debugging has always been 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, traditional techniques used for debugging mostly employ techniques for sequential programs running on the traditional hardware. Modern software today 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 hardware architectures and programming paradigms.

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 debuggers for the future. We welcome researchers studying dynamic and static debugging techniques to help diagnose the root cause of bugs, as well as novel visualization techniques for debugging.

Highlights

Keynote: Amazing Bugs and Where to Find Them

Guillermo Polito

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

DEBT’26 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 8 pages (excluding references).
• Work-in-progress papers on ideas in early stages, from 2 to 4 pages.
• Talks and tool demonstrations, 1-2 page abstract.

For work-in-progress and tool demo papers, please include the type of submission in the title.

Submission guidelines:

Papers must be formatted according to the guidelines for ACM sigplan papers (\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 from the submission.

Submissions should be made via Easychair using the following link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=debt2026

The accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library, though authors will be able to opt out of this publication, if desired. At least one author of an accepted paper must register for the workshop and attend the event to present the work, and participate in the discussions.