From the Change Management Hypothesis to the Independent Variation Principle
Yannick Loth · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
The Change Management Hypothesis (CMH) postulates that the primary purpose of modularization is to minimize the economic cost of change over the system’s lifetime; for systems whose primary economic concern is ongoing evolution, CMH is the candidate foundational objective. The Independent Variation Principle (IVP) is the software-specific principle that constrains elements and their grouping by change-driver assignment. This paper isolates the sufficient steps that carry CMH to IVP, with no motivating, applicative, or supplementary material. Seven load-bearing steps are presented: the CMH postulate; the system tuple; cost factorization; the model-fidelity premise; structural exhaustion with monotonicity properties M1–M4; the CMH-compatible cost-model class; and the four conditions with their completeness theorem. Specialized to software, the four conditions — admissibility, Element Form, Separation, Unification — are exactly the IVP axioms. Within the CMH-compatible cost-model class, under model fidelity, when 𝐸 satisfies Admissibility and Element Form, and in the regime where contamination penalties dominate access savings, the Γ-equivalence partition is the unique CMH optimum up to coarsening ties. Below that regime, CMH itself prescribes a coarser partition; the derivation makes the divergence threshold explicit. A single worked example instantiates the whole chain on a three-element system.