This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 4th European Software Engineering Conference. It contains 6 invited papers and 27 contributed papers selected from more than 135 submissions. The volume has a mixture of themes. Some, such as software engineering and computer supported collaborative work, anticipate future developments; others, such as systems engineering, are more concerned with reports of practical industrial applications. 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 processes; and formal aspects of software engineering.