Incremental Programming

Many

novice programmers start a program with a “big bang" approach, meaning

they want to write the whole program in one step and then only they

would try to compile and run. However as humans we maake many mistakes

when programming, especially given that we have to use a programming

language to do the job and most programming languages differ

drastically from natural languages. Because it is very likely that we

would make mistakes, we have to ensure that we leave room so that we

could easily identify the mistakes we have made.

Incremental Programming

Helps

The

solution to this situation is to adopt an incremental approach in

programming. The idea is to keep building your code using several small

working pieces. The pieces of code would not do a complete job. Rather

they will lay out the skeleton for the final complete program. Once you

are convinced the correct skeleton is in place, you could go on and add

muscle to the program.

Incremental Programming Process

In

incremental programming, the program is incrementally built using

several iterations. In each iteration of the program, it is compiled

and run to ensure that whatever we have in a given increment is

correct. It is very important to always have a working version of the

program, no matter how much logic we have implemented so far. Here is a

simple algorithm depicting the incremental programming process

Identify the

main parts of the program

Write the initial stub to include all the parts

Compile and run to verify the correctness

Fix bugs if any

While whole program is not complete

Change the code to implement more logic

Compile and run to verify the correctness

Fix bugs if any

End while

Program complete

As

you could notice in the above process, we always compile and run the

program whenever we add some logic. The idea is to ensure that we write

a clean program all the time. One would think that this is going to

waste time as we compile and run the incomplete program many times.

However this process going to save time rather than waste time in the

long run. The rationale is that, when you write the whole program at

once and try to compile, you would introduce many bugs at once to the

program and it takes more time to debug. The incremental approach on

the other hand cut down time to debug by eliminating bugs along the

way.

An Example

Let’s look at a very simple example

on how to apply incremental programming. The sample problem is to write

a simple billing program for a coffee dispenser utility. The input to

the program from the user would be the number of coffee cups. Given the

number of coffee cups to dispense, the program is required to calculate

the amount and display to the user.

The first step is to come up with the

solution skeleton. The solution consists of main three steps.

1. get
   
   input
2. calculate amount
3. display result

The simplest

skeleton one could write is:

#include < iostream>

using namespace std;

int main()

{

cout