1 INTRODUCTION These proceedings are the result of a conference on Automating Systems Development held at Leicester Polytechnic, England on 14 to 16 April 1987. The conference was attended by over 170 delegates from industry and academia and it represents a comprehensive review of the state of the art of the use of the computer based tools for the analysis, design and construction of Information Systems (IS). Two parallel streams ran throughout the conference. The academic, or research, papers were the fruit of British, European and Canadian research, with some of the papers reflecting UK...