Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Predictor models in software engineering

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to PROMISE 2008 - the 4th International Workshop on Predictor Models in Software Engineering. This year's workshop continues its tradition of being the premier forum for presentation of research results and experience reports in the area of predictor models applied to software engineering. The theme for this year's workshop is Bridging Research and Industry. Key questions for the workshop are -- How might PROMISE and other researchers better align with the realities of industry? -- How can industry make effective use of research ideas? In keeping with this theme, we have two keynote speakers from industry. Dr. Murray Cantor is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the governance solutions lead on the IBM Rational Software CTO team. Mr. Chris Beal is a Sun Microsystems Senior Staff Engineer working with Solaris Revenue Product Engineering. We are pleased that PROMISE has become an international event. Our call for papers attracted submissions from Asia, Canada, Europe, and the United States. The program committee accepted over a dozen papers covering a variety of topics, including models related to fault prediction, effort estimation, and requirements engineering. One feature that sets this workshop apart from others is the PROMISE repository of software data sets that are publicly available for research purposes. The repository currently has 57 data sets and has grown at an average rate of 44% annually over the last 3.5 years.