Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European conference on Foundations of software engineering (2011)

On behalf of the entire Organizing Committee it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 8th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, an internationally renowned forum for researchers, practitioners, and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in the field of software engineering.

Every second year FSE is jointly organized with ESEC on the Old Continent of Europe. This year's host city is Szeged in the South of Hungary. Szeged, which has always been referred to as the city of sunshine, is simply beautiful and has an atmosphere that no other city has in Hungary. Its sights, like the Votive church, the Synagogue, the Hero's Arch, and the University of Szeged all give a distinct character to the town. From September until late June, the local cafes, restaurants, shops, and streets are all noisy from the lively bustle of university students and the whole town is turned into a nest of youthful spirit. Let us invite you to be part of this unique atmosphere and enjoy your stay during the ESEC/FSE 2011 Conference.

This year's program promises to be very exciting. The research track call for papers attracted 203 papers from all continents. After extensive virtual and physical discussions, the Program Committee accepted 34 papers covering a large veriety of software engineering topics -- ranging from mining software archives and empirical studies over program analysis and testing to collaboration, models, and requirements. Three papers received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award; they are marked in the table of contents.

With this ESEC/FSE, we especially wanted to encourage authors to provide artifacts -- tools or data sets that would help others to build on earlier work. A third of the authors of accepted papers submitted artifacts, judged and assessed by an Artifact Evaluation Board. Authors were enthusiastic about participating and eager to improve their packages, further motivated by a 1,000 US$ Best Artifact Award from Microsoft Research. Overall, seven artifacts were found to meet or exceed expectations, and thus are especially recommended by the Board as a base for future research; you will find them marked in the table of contents.

The whole-day industrial track is another newly added element of the ESEC/FSE program with the purpose to facilitate an open exchange of ideas between academic researchers and practitioners in industry. ESEC/FSE 2011 will also feature Technical Briefings, an all-day event for communicating the state of topics related to software engineering. This year's conference also offers a comprehensive student program, including the Doctoral Symposium, the Technical Briefings and the PhD Working Groups (PWGs). PWGs are offered for PhD students and other young (pre-doc) researchers with the aim of providing them with the opportunity to meet prominent senior researchers in certain software engineering fields and work with them throughout the conference week.