Call for Papers

Software today is inherently large and complex, in fact more so than ever before. Consequently, debugging when failure is observed is also becoming much more difficult and time-consuming. Manual debugging is quickly losing its viability as a practical option, and yet at the same time, techniques that aim for automatic fault localization are still not accurately and consistently able to pinpoint the locations of faults to a desired degree. Distinguishing executions that fail due to different causative faults, reliably recording and replaying failed executions, and fixing bugs without introducing new faults are but some of the debugging-related problems faced by developers today. Furthermore, formal verification techniques suffer from complexity and scalability issues, static techniques can often be imprecise, and the heavy performance overhead of dynamic techniques can prohibit their application. While studies are being conducted to resolve these problems, researchers often make unrealistic assumptions, and subject software may not be representative of large scale industrial applications. Such concerns can induce in practitioners a lack of faith with regard to what research proposals can offer and deliver.