We just recently moved our continuous integration server to new hardware and removed a costly database comparison step, which shortened our build time from 10 minutes to less than 3. Half the time is spent on unit tests, and we include a build versioning step which prepares every build for potential release.
Cutting those seven minutes out of the feedback loop may not seem like much, but when you consider that we average about 20 builds per day that’s significant savings, even if there were only one developer waiting on the build results each time. Next up: database versioning using liquibase.