The growing complexity of software, combined with demands for greater productivity and shorter cycles, creates an increasing demand for more automation and integration within the software engineering domain. When viewed holistically, the heterogeneous nature, implicit feature cross-dependencies, and manual administration of the tool chain infrastructure results in unnecessary complexity, inefficiencies, and reduced reliability to the SE process. A common infrastructure is missing that can provide an interoperable and distributed tool environment, address feature dependency selection, and automate the tool chain workflow composition and execution.

This paper explores the practicality of a unifying Semantic Web Services approach towards Automated Software Engineering (SWS-ASE) to address these challenges. The results show that a unified and standards-based approach can yield significant benefits in areas such as reliability, efficiency, reusability, and reproducibility for the SE domain.