Guest Editorial: INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL SECTION.

The article presents an introduction of article of a special section published in the September 1998 issue of the journal "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering." The author says that this special section contains extended versions three papers presented at the joint meeting of the Sixth European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC) and Fifth ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), held at Zurich, Switzerland in September 1997. The program committee selected 27 papers out of the 194 submitted. ESEC and FSE conferences cover a broad range of topics in software engineering and have a highly technical focus. The first paper "A C++ Data Model Supporting Reachability Analysis and Dead Code Detection," discusses a C++ data model that is the foundation of many program analysis tools. The second paper "Integration of Sequential Scenarios," deals with scenarios that are used to document user-system interactions in system requirements and functional specifications. The third paper "Subtypes for Specifications: Predicate Subtyping in PVS," uses examples to show the utility of predicate subtypes in the specification language program verification system.