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Automation systems, e.g., hydro power plants and industrial automation systems include heterogeneous engineering disciplines, e.g., mechanical, electrical, process, and software engineering, and raise additional challenges for quality assurance activities, e.g., identifying defects in change management processes where different disciplines are involved. Our observations in industry shows various tools and data models with limitations in collaboration and data exchange that hinder effective and efficient quality assurance across disciplines where experts have to collaborate and exchange data. The Automation Service Bus (ASB) offers a middleware platform with focus on (a) integrating tools from difference disciplines and (b) bridging the gap between data models coming from different sources. Based on technical and semantic integration quality assurance across disciplines and domain borders becomes possible. In context of quality assurance and project management this paper presents selected research challenges and shows results of implemented application prototypes of an ongoing project in industry context. Keywords-Quality Assurance, Automation Systems Development Processes, Defect Detection, Integration Testing, Project Management