The increasing use of XML and related technologies in many branches of computer science is also affecting the way software engineering tools are built. XML is becoming a standard in many software engineering applications and its use in the area of tool integration, code re-engineering, application interaction, web and databases integration, is spreading. XML is an abstract and flexible meta language that can be used and adapted to express many kinds of semi-structured data. Furthermore, many different technologies and tools have been developed around XML in order to support parsing, verification, validation, merging, comparing, checking consistency, and linking. Even network communication has been affected with the development of standards, such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

Software engineering seems to have been positively influenced by the existence of these notations and tools. This special section of the Automated Software Engineering Journal includes two examples of how XML and related technologies are influencing the construction of software engineering tools, environments, and software development processes.