Quick question: do you know what a “zombie variant” is?
No, not a Halloween story. It is a product option that is still in the catalog and hasn’t been ordered in years — yet it still ties up engineering time, keeps purchasing busy and blocks spare-parts inventory. It just won’t die.
It is one of over 40 terms that have now made it into the Variant Management Glossary: from A for Additive Configuration to Z for Zombie Variants — part of the variantmanagement.com relaunch I announced recently.
→ Additive Configuration: variants are built bottom-up from independent modules via standardized interfaces — think Lego: the brick is simple, the interface is everything.
→ Zombie Variants: the options nobody buys anymore but everyone still has to maintain.
I have explained some of these terms again and again in real projects. Others I wrote simply because I was curious and wanted to understand them properly myself.
A good glossary is more than a collection of terms — it forces you to define concepts like zombie variants or additive configuration precisely. That is the difference between a term you know and one you truly understand.
