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, does not interoperate and are available on a limited platform set.We analyze such deficiencies and propose an extensible architecture for a 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 flexibility is demonstrated by the specification of an extension to support the MPI programming paradigm and a wide selection of tools that have been built using the system.