What are the benefits of incremental development, compared to the waterfall model?

Incremental development has a number of advantages:
1. Customers can use the early increments as prototypes and gain experience that informs their requirements for later system increments. Unlike prototypes, these are part of the real system so there is no re-learning when the complete system is available.
2. Customers do not have to wait until the entire system is delivered before they can gain value from it. The first increment satisfies their most critical requirements so they can use the software immediately.
3. The process maintains the benefits of incremental development in that it should be relatively easy to incorporate changes into the system.
4. As the highest-priority services are delivered first and increments then integrated, the most important system services receive the most testing. This means that customers are less likely to encounter software failures in the most important parts of the system.