Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) has launched a new spin-off: Swat.engineering. The new start-up -the 25th in CWI’s history- focuses on domain specific software engineering and serves clients in the field of finance, health and embedded. The first part of the company’s name refers to the Software Analysis and Transformation (SWAT) research group at CWI, from which the new enterprise emerged. Davy Landman (CEO): “We are close to the action, because of our strong connection with the SWAT research group, which allows us to intertwine new scientific insights into our advice extremely fast.”
Software: expensive to develop and hard to change
Swat.engineering helps companies to gain control over software development and maintenance with help of domain modelling and automated software analysis and transformation. Organisations are getting more and more dependent of software. It is difficult to align software with changing business purposes, because of the complexity of business processes and increasing IT costs. This makes the adaptation of software time-consuming and sensitive to errors. This is caused by inefficient knowledge exchange between domain experts and IT developers. Rising maintenance costs are also caused by a high level of complexity of critical software. Developers have to search continuously in order to understand the code and this makes changes more expensive.
More efficient communication between business experts and IT developers
Swat.engineering models domain knowledge with a tailormade domain-specific programming language. This makes communication between business experts and IT departments more efficient. Low-code systems try to reach the same goal, but Swat.engineering's solution is easier to integrate into existing systems and is better adaptable to specific demands. This new language is not only understandable for experts from the business, but also for auditors and software developers.
Landman: “For a project in the financial business we have developed a domain specific language to describe financial systems together with domain experts. From this description software has been generated that fits into the existing software architecture. This approach is suitable for every technique (database, network), programming language and environment. We use open source software in order to prevent lock-in.”
Swat.engineering specializes in extracting knowledge from existing source code and gives organizations a grip on their software in this way. This can be domain knowledge for modeling or knowledge to (partly) modernize the source code automatically. New company and system-specific tools are being developed for this together with the client. Large overdue maintenance can be drastically accelerated by performing this in steps semi-automatically.
Founding spin-off companies such as Swat.engineering is an important tool for CWI to bring knowledge and technology to the market. Swat.engineering is the 25th spin-off company of CWI since the founding of computer manufacturer Electrologica in 1956. Other recent spin-offs are: Stokhos (2016), MonetDB Solutions (2013), Spinque (2010) and VectorWise (2008, adopted by Actian in 2011).
Swat.engineering
Swat.engineering has been founded by a team of very experienced researchers from CWI’s SWAT research group: Paul Klint, Davy Landman and Jurgen Vinju. They have made their mark in software research. Klint is one of the founders of domain specific languages worldwide. A more detailed company profile can be found here.
