The COVAMOF Software Variability Assessment Method (COSVAM)

Variability has to undergo continual and timely change, or a product family will risk using the ability to effectively exploit the similarities of its members. Being able to determine whether, when and how variability should respond to changing markets, business needs, and advances in technology, however, is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we present COSVAM (The COVAMOF Variability Assessment Method). The contribution of COSVAM is that it provides a technique for variability assessment in the context of evolution, where no techniques were available up to date. It addresses several issues that are associated to the current practice, i.e. ad-hoc and unstructured methodology, implicit variability, addressing only one layer of abstraction, insufficiently exploring alternative solutions, and neglecting implementation dependencies between features.