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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.