Incremental delivery reduces maintenance cost: a COCOMO-based study

Incremental delivery (ID) is a software development paradigm which advocates that systems be delivered to end users in usable, useful and semi‐independent increments. ID differs from the traditional development paradigm, which we call monolithic delivery (MD), in which a software system is considered as a monolithic, inseparable whole delivered as one unit. The purpose of this study is to compare the ID and MD approaches in terms of their maintenance efforts through an analytical parametric study. The results of the study provide insight into how incremental delivery can be employed to reduce software maintenance effort. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.