Have you considered running distcc on every machine in the building? It greatly speeds up compiles.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/distcc.1.ht...

Quote: "Zeroconf: This option is only available if distcc was compiled with Avahi support enabled at configure time. When this special entry is present in the hosts list, distcc will use Avahi Zeroconf DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) to locate any available distccd servers on the local network. This avoids the need to explicitly list the host names or IP addresses of the distcc server machines. The distccd servers must have been started with the "--zeroconf" option to distccd. An important caveat is that in the current implementation, pump mode (",cpp") and compression (",lzo") will never be used for hosts located via zeroconf."

The above relatively new feature means that compiles will complete even if some local machines go on and off line during the work session.

I think this is the hardest part about doing this. But I try to find other productive things to do while things are compiling.

- Write code comments

- Write tests

- Have a separate code checkout where you can work on another feature.

- Research the next thing you're working on.

- Work on improving the build time, while it's building :)

It's hard to always be doing something, but if you consciously make an effort to do it then it can have a large impact.

If your incremental builds take ten minutes that is probably the number one issue you need to fix at work.

Every new dev machine should have an SSD.

It's under $1/GB