Book excerpt: The 7th ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications (SERA 2009) was held on Hainan Island, China from December 2 – 4. SERA ’09 featured excellent theoretical and practical contributions in the areas of formal methods and tools, requirements engineering, software process models, communication systems and networks, software quality and evaluation, software engineering, networks and mobile computing, parallel/distributed computing, software testing, reuse and metrics, database retrieval, computer security, software architectures and modeling. Our conference officers selected the best 17 papers from those papers accepted for presentation at the conference in order to publish them in this volume. The papers were chosen based on review scores submitted by members or the program committee, and underwent further rigorous rounds of review.