As part of the FARMHANDS project, a methodology for the development of distributed functional systems has been proposed. This methodology has several advantages and benefits with regard to more traditional and classic paradigms and technologies:

• During the early stages of requirements extraction, analysis and design, reusable techniques and procedures have been identified, which can improve other steps of the development process, especially validation. Of special interest is the adaptation of model artifacts and design patterns, as well as the the formalisation of elicitated concepts, as both an additional step towards a better understanding of the domain and a new open door for properties extraction, automatic reasoning and formal verification.
• Implementation is carried out from a declarative perspective, closer to the design abstraction level. Not only this easies the implementation task, but also allows the usage of tools based on formal methods and other interesting validation options such as testing of properties by automatic massive generation of test cases. This includes from datatypes to component integration or even business rules.