Competitive Debugging Toward Contests Promoting Debugging as a Skill Patrick Rein Hasso Plattner Institute University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany patrick.rein@hpi.uni-potsdam.de Tom Beckmann Hasso Plattner Institute University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany tom.beckmann@hpi.uni-potsdam.de Leonard Geier Hasso Plattner Institute University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany leonard.geier@hpi.uni-potsdam.de Toni Mattis Hasso Plattner Institute University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany toni.matis@hpi.uni-potsdam.de Robert Hirschfeld Hasso Plattner Institute University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany robert.hirschfeld@uni-potsdam.de Abstract Debugging is an essential part of software development. Nu- merous tools and techniques to improve debugging have been proposed in research or developed in the industry. How- ever, only a few of those see widespread use, and debugging only rarely is a primary teaching subject. To promote debugging as a distinct skill, we propose Com- petitive Debugging, where participants compete on who can repair a failure the fastest or the most comprehensively. We further propose a format for debugging contests aimed at attracting and engaging participants to motivate them to improve their debugging skills. In our proposed format par- ticipants simultaneously work on the same failure or observe fellow participants during their debugging activity. To eval- uate the format, we ran two pilots and one main event. We found that the format prompted participants to refect on their debugging process, that the format allowed them to compare their debugging approaches to others through post- round discussions on their various approaches, and that the format was enjoyable and engaging for all participants. We present our format of a debugging contest, an evaluation of the trial runs we performed, and give guidance for other peo- ple who consider hosting a Competitive Debugging event. Ultimately, we aim to provide developers with opportu- nities to improve their debugging skills. Our observations indicate that Competitive Debugging can provide such op- portunities to train debugging techniques and learn new tools. Onward! ’22, December 8ś10, 2022, Auckland, New Zealand © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9909-8/22/12. htps://doi.org/10.1145/3563835.3567665 CCS Concepts: • Social and professional topics → Com- puting education; • Software and its engineering → Soft- ware maintenance tools. Keywords: debugging, competitive debugging, competition, contest, teaching, training ACM Reference Format: Patrick Rein, Tom Beckmann, Leonard Geier, Toni Mattis, and Robert Hirschfeld. 2022. Competitive Debugging: Toward Contests Promot- ing Debugging as a Skill. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Refec- tions on Programming and Software (Onward! ’22), December 8ś10, 2022, Auckland, New Zealand. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. htps://doi.org/10.1145/3563835.3567665 1 Introduction Programmers spend considerable time debugging the pro- grams they are working on. Depending on the study, debug- ging takes up 13 % to 40 % percent of programmers’ software development time [2, 23][28, p. 8-2]. Correspondingly, to improve debugging, the research communities on program- ming languages and software engineering have developed numerous debugging strategies and tools, such as general- ized backward reasoning [33], time-travel debuggers [17, 24], and automatic debugging tools [32]. However, most programmers use few of these tools and techniques in practice, although they would beneft from them [8, 23]. Programmers either do not know about ad- vanced tools [23] or do not know how to set them up and make efcient use of them [30]. The reason for this mis- match may be a lack of education and training on debug- ging [2, 22, 23]. At the same time, researchers also found that debugging skills can be taught [19]. Numerous studies have shown that when students learn and train debugging skills, they employ systematic debugging techniques more often and become more productive at debugging [19, 21]. Neverthe- less, debugging seems to be seldom taught extensively and This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Interna- tional License. 172