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The article introduces to papers about empirical software engineering (ESE) included in the July 1999 issue of the journal "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering." The paper "Evaluating Emerging Software Development Technologies: Lessons Learned From Assessing Aspect-Oriented Programming," by authors G.C. Murphy, R.J. Walker and E.L.A Baniassad focuses on the need to develop ways of providing cost-effective and timely results. The paper "Building Knowledge Through Families of Experiments," by authors V.R. Basili, F. Shull and F. Lanubile describes the way in which the research community might build a body of knowledge in ESE through similar studies and replication of phenomena of interest, in this case software reading techniques. Another paper "Ginger 2: An Environment for CAESE," by authors K. Torii, K.-I. Matsumoto, K. Nakakoji, Y. Takada, S. Takada and K. Shima looks behind the individual empirical study, in this case, to the infrastructure that might be created to enable the packaging of experimental processes. The authors described a laboratory environment and suite of hardware and software that enables a particular type of laboratory experimentation which can be used to address questions associated with individual work around programming.

The Symposium on Foundations in Software Engineering is an annual conference sponsored by Association for Computing Machinery, a computer portal and dedicated to the presentation of innovative research results contributing to an engineering discipline for software systems. This special section of the July 1998 issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering features three of the best papers from the fourth symposium, held in October 1996 in San Francisco, California. During its first half-decade, research results presented at this conference have covered engineering research topics. However, a number of distinguishing properties tend to characterize the best of the papers and have helped set the standards for high-quality software engineering research. The three papers in this special section illustrate these properties. One of the critical challenges for software engineering research is to find practical tools that help system builder restructure existing systems. Mark Moriconi was general chair for the symposium and deserves considerable credit for its success.