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Reconstructing the past: the case of the Spadina Expressway

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Abstract

In order to build resilient systems that can be operational for a long time, it is important that analysts are able to model the evolution of the requirements of that system. The Evolving Intentions framework models how stakeholders’ goals change over time. In this work, our aim is to validate applicability and effectiveness of this technique on a substantial case. In the absence of ground truth about future evolutions, we used historical data and rational reconstruction to understand how a project evolved in the past. Seeking a well-documented project with varying stakeholder intentions over a substantial period of time, we selected requirements of the Toronto Spadina Expressway. In this paper, we report on the experience and the results of modeling this project over different time periods, which enabled us to assess the modeling and reasoning capabilities of the approach, its support for asking and answering ‘what if’ questions, and the maturity of the underlying tool support. We also demonstrate a novel process for creating time-based models through the construction and merging of scenarios.

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Notes

  1. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/ amgrubb/archive/REJ19-SI

  2. https://github.com/amgrubb/BloomingLeaf

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Acknowledgements

We thank the historical experts we interviewed, as well as the REJ reviewers. We also thank Boyue Caroline Hu for her assistance in conducting the expert interviews, and the members of the Modeling group in Toronto for their ongoing discussion of this work.

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  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Alicia M. Grubb & Marsha Chechik

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  1. Alicia M. Grubb
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  2. Marsha Chechik
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Correspondence to Alicia M. Grubb.

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Grubb, A.M., Chechik, M. Reconstructing the past: the case of the Spadina Expressway. Requirements Eng 25, 253–272 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-019-00321-0

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