Software today is larger and more complex than ever before. It is hardly surprising that debugging and repair are becoming more difficult and costly. On the other hand, this provides golden opportunities for researchers to explore how to tackle real-world problems. While manual debugging is impractical for large software, automatic fault-localization techniques have not matured to the desired level of accuracy, consistency, and usability. Developers face many obstacles in debugging and repair, such as uncertainties in the suspiciousness of program entities in the presence of multiple faults, difficulties in reliably recording and replaying failed executions, and bug fixes that may introduce even more faults. Furthermore, many existing approaches suffer from critical shortcomings that limit their applicability, including the complexity and unscalability of formal verification, the imprecision of static analysis, the low performance of dynamic techniques, and the high setup and operating costs of human-centric debugging environments. It is very common that researchers rely on simplified models that do not accurately reflect the complexity in large-scale industrial software. Practitioners question whether research proposals and results can actually benefit their work.

The IEEE IDEAR Workshop has extended the highly successful IEEE International Workshop on Program Debugging (IWPD) to include the program repair aspects, which are of major importance to modern software development such as in continuous integration. The goal of the IDEAR Workshop is to highlight the most pressing challenges and innovative solutions associated with program debugging and repair, especially with respect to software business, methodologies, techniques, environments, and human factors. Industry experience reports and empirical studies are also welcome. We aim to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the latest advancements and identify further challenges that must be overcome.