The origins of the Software Engineering Group go back to 1980. Mike Tedd took two year’s leave, from 1979 to 1981, to go to work for SPL (Systems Programmers Ltd) in Abingdon and Frank Bott came to Aberystwyth in his place. Shortly after Mike arrived in SPL he conceived the idea of a configuration management / version control tool. Mike and Frank applied for, and received, a CASE studentship to develop a prototype. Frank was the academic supervisor and Mike the industrial one. Unfortunately, the student to whom the studentship was awarded gave up after one year. The project did just about enough for Frank to able to give a paper about it at a conference in Reading in September 1981.

The early work of the Group was on Integrated Project Support Environments (IPSEs) and Ada Project Support Environments (APSEs). This work was supported by two large funding agencies. The CEC’s large Esprit programme started in 1983 and ran to 1998 in five phases, and the Alvey Programme was a British government sponsored research programme in information technology that ran from 1983 to 1988, with a total budget of over £300M.

One of Alvey’s main themes was Software Engineering. The programme funded several projects to research and develop IPSE technology. One large project, ECLIPSE, involved three companies and three universities, including ourselves, to design and develop an IPSE; this ran from 1984 to 1988. ECLIPSE eventually became a commercial product.

Within the activity of PSE research interest developed in defining tool support interfaces (TSIs) which the tools would run on. There were two main TSI initiatives. In Europe, a consortium led by Groupe Bull was also keen to develop a TSI, called PCTE. The ECLIPSE project later adopted PCTE to support its tools. PCTE became an ECMA standard.

In the US, a group called KIT/KITIA was set up to develop CAIS, a TSI particularly for APSEs. The first version of CAIS was primitive so a high-powered working group was set up to develop a second version, CAIS 2. CAIS became a DoD standard.

In Aberystwyth we gained experience of both PCTE and CAIS in two projects: KITE (funded by the MoD, 1985-88) and Sapphire (funded by the CEC 1986-1989) in which we were part of a consortium with UK and French companies. During this time Frank and Mike were active in both Ada UK and Ada Europe – two groups set up to coordinate efforts and exchange expertise on Ada and PSEs.

ARISE was another large project with companies from six countries, funded by the CEC’s RACE programme. It concerned software environments emphasising the reuse of software, especially in the telecommunications field. Edel Sherratt and Mike Tedd were the Aberystwyth grant holders.

Mark Ratcliffe was one of the department's first research staff in Software Engineering. He was a student in 1980–84 and stayed on to work on the Alvey funded ECLIPSE project, and the EU funded DRAGON project. Mark was awarded his PhD and appointed as a Lecturer in 1989. He then took a job swap with Professor Bob Matthews of Puget Sound, Washington State. It was this year that led Mark to introduce the Activity Weekends which still run to this day. In 1997, Mark was appointed Senior Lecturer and Director of Teaching, a post he held until leaving the department in 2006.

Members of the Group ran two courses for Marconi in the summer of 1983 (and repeated in 1984). The courses, which lasted some ten weeks over the summer, were intended to meet Marconi’s needs for software engineers by taking good arts graduates and giving them an intensive course in software development. The courses were eminently successful, so much so that the students who graduated from them quickly left Marconi for more interesting and better paid jobs in the IT industry. As a result, Marconi dropped the idea.

Members of the Group also gave half a dozen or so PCTE courses for industry in the late 1980s. These were quite successful.

Fred Long was originally appointed to the Department of Pure Mathematics in 1974 but started teaching for Computer Science in 1976, becoming full-time in Computer Science in 1987. He spent the 1981–1982 academic year on job leave working at SPL in Abingdon.

During 1986 and 1987, Frank was a member of the coordinating committee for the revision of the Department of Industry’s STARTS Guide. This was a guide to the use of methods and tools for the software supply industry. Frank wrote the introductory chapters and parts of other chapters. He subsequently chaired the working party which produced the chapter on Design Methods and Tools for the STARTS Purchasers’ Guide. Frank was a regular referee for the Software Engineering Journal and, in 1989, edited a special issue on Software Engineering Education. He was, for five years, a member of the editorial board of the British Computer Society/Prentice Hall Practitioner Series. He was, for ten years, a member of the editorial board of the British Computer Society Practitioner Series, published first by Prentice Hall and then by Springer. He was an active member of the British Computer Society throughout his career, serving on its Examination Board, its Accreditation Panel, its Disciplinary Panel and numerous other committees.

Lynda Thomas joined the department as a part-time PhD student in 1990. She joined Andy Ormsby working with Frank on early Object-Oriented programming research and worked as Edel's maternity replacement on the BOOST project from 1992‒1994. Lynda completed her PhD in 1995 and returned to the department as a Teaching Fellow in 1999. Mark and Lynda started to move into the area of Computer Science Education research after attending an NSF sponsored summer programme in the United States which took place in the summers of 2000‒2002.

In 1992, Fred took sabbatical leave to study at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. He became a Visiting Scientist at the SEI and carried out research there, mainly during summer vacations. Initially, he worked on Software Engineering Environments, and then from 2004 until 2015 he worked on Secure Coding.

Within the Software Engineering Group, Mark moved focus to Software Engineering Education, and through College funding set up a spinout company, Khaydor (2002-2005), to promote e-learning. Khaydor developed one of the first Teaching Integrated Project Support Environments (equivalent to today's MOODLE). Mark continued to be active in a collaborative EU-US research group formed through an NSF sponsored summer programme in the United States (2001‒2003). Fred, Mark Ratcliffe, Mike and Frank acted as external examiners for undergraduate courses, taught postgraduate courses and PhDs in many universities both in the UK and abroad.