Effort estimation in incremental software development

Abstract

Incremental software development offers many benefits compared with more traditional development approaches. Indeed, incremental approaches have been utilised for many years due to the involvement of users, the early demonstration of capability and the potential for risk reduction that they offer. However, there appears to have been little work on modelling, planning and controlling incremental development. The paper attempts to introduce a quantitative analytical framework for evaluating such approaches and their impacts on the development effort. Models that predict development effort as an exponential function of product size are used in the paper to explore some of the relationships between effort and the number of increments, thereby providing new insights into the economic impact of incremental approaches to software projects.