Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement

It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the Second International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2008) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Empirical software engineering and measurement are important sub-disciplines aimed at advancing software engineering towards an engineering discipline. They focus on measurement in order to better understand, control, and improve software development processes, and on empirical studies to better model products and processes and understand process products. The 1st ESEM was held in Madrid in September 2007. Although this is only the second ESEM symposium, this series continues the long tradition of two high-quality conference series. ESEM resulted from the merger of the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE) and the IEEE International Software Metrics Symposium (METRICS). ISESE was held five times, first in Japan in 2002 and last in Brazil in 2006. As its name suggests, ISESE's primary goal was to disseminate knowledge on and from experimental research on software engineering. METRICS is a long-standing conference series, which was held first in the United States in 1999 and last in Italy in 2005. METRICS' foremost objective was to disseminate knowledge on and from research on software metrics. ESEM 2008 is part of the week-long Experimental Software Engineering International Week (ESEIW) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. It is an honor to welcome this conference to Kaiserslautern. Kaiserslautern has evolved into one of the premier centers for software & systems research in Europe. About 800 scientists and engineers -- spread across 3 departments of the University of Kaiserslautern and several institutes -- are working on advancing the state of the art in our field. The institutes include a Max-Planck Institute on Software Systems, two Fraunhofer Institutes -- for Industrial Mathematics (ITWM) and Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) -- and the German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). I invite you to learn more about any of these institutes during your stay. We have a full two-day program of three parallel tracks on each day including two keynotes, technical papers, short papers, and a panel (please see the message from the Program Chairs for details).