On the decline of classical programming -- Computers are not omnipotent -- Real-time systems: A survey of approaches to formal specification and verification -- Software engineering in business and academia: How wide is the gap? -- Software faults in evolving a large, real-time system: a case study -- The Experience Factory and its relationship to other Improvement Paradigms -- Inconsistency handling in multi-perspective specifications -- Requirements engineering: An integrated view of representation, process, and domain -- Making changes to formal specifications: Requirements and an example -- Formal requirements made practical -- Databases for software engineering environments -- A regression testing database model -- Experiences with a federated environment testbed -- Observations on object management systems and process support in environments -- Software technology for a distributed telecommunication system -- Industrial software development — a case study -- Quantitative approach to software management: the ami method -- Preventative software engineering -- Distributed information systems: An advanced methodology -- Tractable flow analysis for anomaly detection in distributed programs -- A pragmatic task design approach based on a Ward/Mellor real-time structured specification -- Integration of structured analysis and timed statecharts for real-time and concurrency specification -- Language constructs for cooperative systems design -- Scrutiny: A collaborative inspection and review system -- COO: A transaction model to support cooperating software developers Coordination -- An experiment in software retrieval -- Using formal methods to construct a software component library -- Capsule oriented reverse engineering for software reuse -- Automatic replanning of task networks for process model evolution in EPOS -- Provence: A process visualization and enactment environment -- Process programming with active and passive components -- A formal framework for ASTRAL intra-level proof obligations -- Assertion-based debugging of imperative programs by abstract interpretation.

This volume contains the proceedings of the fourth European Software Engineering Conference. It contains 6 invited papers and 27 contributed papers selected from more than 135 submissions. The volume has a mixtureof themes. Some, such as software engineering and computer supported collaborative work, are forward-looking and anticipate future developments; others, such as systems engineering, are more concerned with reports of practical industrial applications. Some topics, such as software reuse, reflect the fact that some of the concerns first raised in 1969 when software engineering was born remain unsolved problems. The contributed papers are organized under the following headings: requirements specification, environments, systems engineering, distributed software engineering, real-time systems, software engineering and computer supported collaborative work, software reuse, software process, and formal aspects of software engineering.