In recent years there has been a substantial increase in the availability and quality of software engineering tools; such tools are invaluable in ensuring program correctness and identifying performance problems. The majority of these, however, do not interoperate and are available on a limited platform set.
We analyse such deficiencies and propose an extensible architecture for an distributed software engineering tool framework using CORBA object-oriented technology. The resulting framework provides a unified interface for parallel, distributed and single-processor systems, facilitates tool development, promotes tool interoperability, and can be extended by the integration of new tools and services. This extendibility is demonstrated by the specification of the extension to support the MPI programming paradigm and a wide selection of tools that have been built using the system.'