SWS-ASE: Leveraging Web Service-based Software Engineering

Web Service (WS)-based integration is a broadly accepted technique to address the heterogeneity in current software systems. With regard to the growing complexity of state-of-the-art software engineering (SE) processes, Semantic WS (SWS) can be a strategy to manage the heterogeneous SE software tools and inherent cross-dependencies in an automated way. This paper presents an interoperable tool approach for Automated Software Engineering (ASE) which comprises a distributed SE process management framework based on SWS. It includes plug-ins to visualize the generated workflows as well as to manage the feature dependencies of SE choices, e.g., with regard to quality criteria. Application of the SWS-ASE infrastructure within industrial use cases yielded significant improvements in areas such as reliability, usability, and efficiency. Within this paper, the results of such a use case are discussed and depicted in detail.