It was our great pleasure to extend a welcome to all who participated in SERA 2003, the ?rst world-classs International Conference on Software Engineering Research and Applications, which was held at Crowne Plaza Union Square Hotel, San Francisco, California, USA. The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Computer and Information Science (ACIS), in cooperation with the Software Engine- ing and Information Technology Institute at Central Michigan University. This conference was aimed at discussing the wide range of problems encountered in present and future high technologies. In this conference, we had keynote speeches by Dr. Barry Boehm and Dr. C.V. Ramamoorthy and invited talks by