Today's software production is increasingly distributed. Gone are the days of one-company,one-siteprojects;mostindustrialdevelopmentsinvolveteamssplit over locations, countries, and cultures. This distribution poses new challenges, for example, how to develop the software requirements speci?cation, and how to manage the project. These challenges are formidable; many failures have been reportedinoutsourcedanddistributedprojects,oftenduenottolackoftechnical expertise, but to di?culties in management and communication. SEAFOOD 2010, the fourth international conference on Software Engine- ing Advances For Outsourced and O?shore Development, was held in Peterhof (SaintPetersburg),Russia,on17-18June2010.SEAFOOD2010providedan- portunity for participants from academia and industry to confront experiences, ideas and proposals. The submissions received covered a wide range of topics, from country-wide reports from Russia and Argentina to global projectmana- ment. This volume includes 8 papers (4 full papers and 4 short papers) from the conference, selected after review by the Program Committee.
The program also included two keynote presentations and the extended abstracts are included in this volume: "A Smarter Way: The Software Engineering Method and Theory Initiative (Semat)", by Ivar Jacobson, and "The Consortium for IT Software Quality", by Richard Mark Soley and Bill Curtis. Many people contributed to SEAFOOD 2010. We thank the Program C- mittee and the external reviewers for their excellent work in reviewing and - lecting the papers. The role of Andrei Voronkov's EasyChair conference system is gratefully acknowledged.