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Legislation-driven development of a Gift Aid system using Event-B

Formal Aspects of Computing volume 32, pages 251–273 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

This work presents our approach to formally model the Swiftaid system design, a digital platform that enables donors to automatically add Gift Aid to donations made via card payments. Following principles of Behaviour-Driven Development, we use Gherkin to capture requirements specified in legislation, specifically the UK Charity (Gift Aid Declarations) Regulations 2016. The Gherkin scenarios provide a basis for subsequent formal modelling and analysis using Event-B, Rodin and ProB. Interactive model simulations assist communication between domain experts, software architects and other stakeholders during requirements capture and system design, enabling the emergent system behaviour to be validated. Our approach was employed within the development of the real Swiftaid product, launched by Streeva in February 2019. Our analysis helped conclude that there was not a strong enough business case for one of the features, whichwas shown to provide nominal user convenience at the expense of increased complexity. This work provides a case study in allying formal and agile software development to enable rapid development of robust software.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by UKRI through the Innovate UK Swiftaid Project (Grant Number 133294). We thank Chris Chorley and Dr. François Dupressoir for contributing to the specification of Gherkin scenarios and Event-B modelling and we thank Dr. Benjamin Aziz and Dr. Philip Godsiff for insightful comments on an early draft of this paper. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for providing their essential critical insight.

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Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, PO1 3HE, UK

    David M. Williams

  2. Information Security Group, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0EX, UK

    Salaheddin Darwish

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, UK

    Steve Schneider

  4. Streeva Ltd., Surrey Technology Centre, Guildford, GU2 7YG, UK

    David R. Michael

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  1. David M. Williams
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  2. Salaheddin Darwish
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  3. Steve Schneider
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  4. David R. Michael
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Correspondence to David M. Williams.

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Williams, D.M., Darwish, S., Schneider, S. et al. Legislation-driven development of a Gift Aid system using Event-B. Form Asp Comp 32, 251–273 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-020-00512-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-020-00512-5

Keywords

  • Behaviour-driven development
  • Formal modelling
  • Gherkin
  • Event-B
  • Gift Aid
  • Swiftaid