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.