The third European Software Engineering Conference followsESEC'87 and ESEC'89. This series of conferences was set upby the European societies with the aim of providing aninternational forum for researchers, developersand users ofsoftware engineering technology. The need for a meetingpoint to discuss new results and useful experiences wasclear from the large amount of high-quality Europeansoftware engineering researchin recent years, stimulated,for example, through major European research programmes. The22 papers in these proceedings were selected from 133 paperssubmitted from 26 different countries. They cover a fairlybroad range of themes such as formal methods and practicalexperiences with them, special techniques for real-timesystems, software evolution and re-engineering, softwareengineering environments, and software metrics. Invitedpapers by well-known experts address further importantareas: perspectives on configuration management, softwarefactories, user interfacedesign, computer security, andtechnology transfer.