This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Software Engineering, FSE '97, held jointly with the 5th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE '97 in Zurich, Switzerland in September 1997. The volume presents 27 revised full papers selected from a total of 194 submissions. Also included are six invited presentations. All in all the volume is a unique presentation of state-of-the-art research and development in software engineering. The papers are organized in topical sections on software engineering education, software architecture, processes, configuration and process tools, formal analysis, empirical studies, system modelling, testing, program analysis, and decomposition and distribution.