Guest Editors' Introduction: 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering.

Software pervades the growing web of computers and communications systems providing diverse services, personal, commercial, financial, public, and entertainment services. Providing timely, cost-effective, high-quality software for these diverse services requires the best possible technology and practice that the software engineering community can provide. The 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) was held in Los Angeles, California. Following the lead of previous ICSE conferences, the aim of ICSE held in the year 1999 was to bring together software engineering practitioners and researchers to present and discuss the most promising approaches for meeting the software challenges of the next century. The February 2001, issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering presents a special section with some of the best papers of the conference held in the year 1999. These papers were selected through an additional review process conducted after the conference. The ICSE '99 program committee selected a number of the best quality papers. The authors of these papers were invited to submit extended versions of their papers for consideration for journal publication.