Incremental computing

Incremental computing, also known as incremental computation, is a software feature which, whenever a piece of data changes, attempts to save time by only recomputing those outputs which depend on the changed data. When incremental computing is successful, it can be significantly faster than computing new outputs naively. For example, a spreadsheet software package might use incremental computation in its recalculation features, to update only those cells containing formulas which depend (directly or indirectly) on the changed cells.

An automated incremental computing tool is a specialised program analysis tool for optimization.