Afterthree decadesofresearch andpractice,reuse ofexistingsoftwareartefactsremains the most promising approach to decreasing effort for software development and evo- tion, increasing quality of software artefacts and decreasing time to market of software products. Over time, we have seen impressive improvements, in extra-organizational reuse,e.g.COTS,aswellasinintra-organizationalreuse,e.g.softwareproductfamilies. Despite the successes that we, as a community, have achieved, several challenges remain to be addressed. The theme for this eighth meeting of the premier international conference on software reuse is the management of software variability for reusable software.Allreusablesoftwareoperatesinmultiplecontextsandhastoaccommodatethe differencesbetweenthesecontextsthroughvariation.Inmodernsoftware,thenumberof variation points may range in the thousands with an even larger number of dependencies between these points. Topics addressing the theme include the representation, design, assessment and evolution of software variability. The proceedings that you are holding as you read this report on the current state-- the-art in software reuse.Topics covered in the proceedings include software variability, testing of reusable software artefacts, feature modeling, aspect-oriented software de- lopment, composition of components and services, model-based approaches and several other aspects of software reuse.May 2004 Jan Bosch Charles Krueger Organizing Committee General Chair Kyo C. Kang, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea Program Co-chairs Jan Bosch, University of Groningen, The Netherlands Charles Krueger, BigLever Software, Inc., U.S.A.
