I recently upgraded my system from Ubuntu 16.04 with Unity to Ubuntu 17.10 with Gnome Shell 3. One of the "features" I found annoying was that my IDE PhpStorm was not popping to the front and receiving focus whenever breakpoints were hit. I eventually figured out a solution and wanted to document it in case others were also searching for a solution.

I first confirmed that "Focus application on breakpoint" was indeed enabled in my settings: