Build, old woman! Build like the wind!
What's your build speed? How long does it take between you clicking on the check-in button and the green (or red!) light appearing on the task bar telling you your build succeeded (or failed!). In our case a finished build is announced by Homer shouting "woohoo!" or "D'oh!", and it takes around three minutes for the "express" build - just compilation and unit tests- and twenty minutes for the full build, which includes acceptance tests, MSI compilation and deployment. That's for a 200,000 line application, which I suppose is medium-sized.
Colleagues on different projects have remarked on this as being pretty quick, and have noted build speeds of 1 - 2 hours for similar sized applications. The biggest overhead for them seems to be database activity, which we try to minimise by using mock objects and abstraction layers like Neo. We also try to keep compile times as short as possible by aggresively deleting dead code, useless comments and using statements etc., and to keep unit tests small and well-targeted.
So, it would be interesting to get a sense of how long other people sit around for waiting for a build, and what the biggest contributing factors to slow build speeds are. Does your build take so long you only run it at night? Do you find it unnecessary to build more than once a day (or even less frequently?). Let me know.