Incremental construction: A study of refinement and composition based approaches

In order to construct large complex systems in manageable steps, incremental software construction methods that can scale up are highly desirable. In this paper, we present a study of current approaches to construct software incrementally. Primarily, existing construction approaches can be categorised into two groups: (i) construction by programming and (ii) construction by composition. Based on our study, we conclude that composing programs by well-defined composition mechanisms is more advantageous than programming at the computation level and that the system can be built by composition without loosing the flexibility of programming based construction approaches.