Architectural requirements as basis to quality of software engineering environments

In the last years, a proliferation of tools and software engineering environments (SEEs) can be noticed, impacting positively in software production. Although the reuse is focus of research in software development, tools and SEEs have been sometimes individually build, without attention in reusing development efforts. Besides that, the architectures of these tools and environments, as well as the establishment of reference architectures, have not been broadly investigated. This fact can make difficult integrating and evolving these environments. Thus, this paper aims at presenting a set of architectural requirements of SEEs. These requirements were the basis to establishment of a reference architecture of SEEs. Partial results have showed the viability of this architecture providing basis to incremental development of evolvable SEEs.