How to step one step back in IntelliJ?

You can drop the frames until you reach the point where you want to be. This isn't exactly stepping backwards, but it is quite similar in a lot of respects.

Though as the comments mention below, this will not revert the global state of your application -- which isn't a huge concern if you're developing stateless services, but could be if you're developing swing applications (if anyone actually does that any more).

On the debugger toolbar it looks like this: . In Idea 2016.3 the drop-frame icon changed to look like this , and since 2019.3 it changed to look like this .

Full documentation is available here: IntelliJ Debugger Docs, and there is a StackOverflow Drop Frame Question, with a few useful answers

Check out Chronon Debugger plugin which actually allows you to step back, not just drop the frame http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2014/03/try-chronon-debugger-with-intellij-idea-13-1-eap/