The lifeblood of the digital economy are complex software systems, which need to be fit for purpose. These software systems will be developed on a global scale in the future digital economy. These global collaborations involve the integration of engineering teams and user organizations that are geographically dispersed on different continents, have different domain knowledge and cultural backgrounds. To engineer fit-for-purpose software, engineers need to use appropriate principles, methods, techniques, tools and infrastructures for the systematic construction these are developed in a discipline of computer science that is called software engineering. Currently many global software development efforts use traditional software engineering techniques, some of which have been proposed more than 30 years ago. This is in part because research results that address the specific needs for global distributed software development projects are largely unavailable. This network of academic research groups in the UK and India, together with a number of industrial collaborators aims to understand the future research needs for software engineering and distributed systems that derive from such global collaboration. These needs will be consolidated into a research agenda that is shared amongst the network partners and the project then intends to develop a collaborative and interdisciplinary research proposal that can be submitted to the EPSRC and their Indian counterpart, the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology.

The network is being coordinated by the Software Systems Engineering Group at UCL.

W. Emmerich

• <link http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/home.php?id=13>Prof. Santosh Shrivastava (Newcastle)</link>
• <link http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~alw/>Alexander L. Wolf (Imperial College)</link>
• <link http://www.cse.iitd.ernet.in/~jalote/>Pankaj Jalote (IIT Delhi)</link>
• <link http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~krithi/>Krithi Ramamritham (IIT Bombay)</link>

The network is funded through the INTERACT/India Programme of the EPSRC in the amount of £108,285