This volume contains the proceedings of the fourth EuropeanSoftware Engineering Conference. It contains 6 invitedpapers and 27 contributed papers selected from more than 135submissions.The volume has a mixtureof themes. Some, such as softwareengineering and computer supported collaborative work, areforward-looking and anticipate future developments; others,such as systems engineering, are more concerned with reportsof practical industrial applications. Some topics, such assoftware reuse, reflect the fact that some of the concernsfirst raised in 1969 when software engineering was bornremain unsolved problems.The contributed papers are organized under the followingheadings: requirements specification, environments, systemsengineering, distributed software engineering, real-timesystems, software engineering and computer supportedcollaborative work, software reuse, software process, andformal aspects of software engineering.