Major economic upheavals can have the sort of effect that Schumpeter foresaw 60 years ago as creative destruction. In science and technology, equivalent upheavals result from either scientific revolutions (as observed by Kuhn) or the introduction of what Christensen calls disruptive technologies. And in software engineering, there has been no technology more disruptive than outsourcing. That it should so quickly reach maturity and an unparalleled scale is truly remarkable; that it should now be called to demonstrate its sustainability in the current—nancial turmoil is the challenge that will prove whether and how it will endure. Early signs under even the bleak market conditions of the last 12 months are that it will not only survive, it will—rmly establish its role across the world of business. Outsourcing throws into sharp focus the entire software engineering life- cle. Topics as diverse as requirements analysis, concurrency and model-checking need to find a composite working partnership in software engineering practice. This confluence arises from need, not dogma, and the solutions required are those that will have the right effect on the associated activities in the world of the application: e.g., reducing the time for a transaction or making the results of a complex analysis available in real-time. While the business of outsourcing continues to be studied, the engineering innovations that make it compelling are constantly changing. It is in this milieu that this series of conferences has placed itself.
