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 Government funded Alvey or European ESPRIT research projects. Two important touchstones guided the selection of academic papers. Firstly, they should be primarily concerned with system, rather than program, development. Secondly, they should be easily accessible to delegates and readers. We felt that formal mathematical papers had plenty of other opportunities for airing and publication. The second stream was the applied programme; a set of formal presentations given by leading software vendors and consultancies. It is clear that many advances in systems development are actually applied, rather than re search led. Thus it was important for delegates to hear how leading edge companies view the State of the Art. This was supported by a small exhibi tion area where certain vendors demonstrated the software they had intro duced in the formal presentation.