Brian Rosenthal's Weblog

I just went to SDWest (awesome!) and learned about commonality variability analysis. I think it’s one of the most important advances in computer science theory out there, and it’s worth a blog entry. Zvi and I spent years trying to come up with a core idea for how to measure the virtues of abstractions, and it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a foundational theory.

CVA has two important ideas:
1. Contain what varies and only what varies.
2. To find abstractions, find differences that play the same role.