The group investigates engineering principles, methods, notations, infrastructures and tools for distributed and mobile software systems, which are often large and complex. The group focuses on: the real-world goals for, services provided by, and constraints on such systems; the precise specification of system structure and behaviour, and the implementation of these specifications; the activities required in order to develop an assurance that the specifications and real-world goals have been met; the evolution of such systems over time and across system families. It is also concerned with the processes, methods and tools for the development of software intensive systems in an economic and timely manner.