Book excerpt: The third European Software Engineering Conference follows ESEC'87 and ESEC'89. This series of conferences was set up by the European societies with the aim of providing an international forum for researchers, developersand users of software engineering technology. The need for a meeting point to discuss new results and useful experiences was clear from the large amount of high-quality European software engineering researchin recent years, stimulated, for example, through major European research programmes. The 22 papers in these proceedings were selected from 133 papers submitted from 26 different countries. They cover a fairly broad range of themes such as formal methods and practical experiences with them, special techniques for real-time systems, software evolution and re-engineering, software engineering environments, and software metrics. Invited papers by well-known experts address further important areas: perspectives on configuration management, software factories, user interfacedesign, computer security, and technology transfer.