Here's an interesting contrast I recently picked up. Two enterprise application projects of a similar size (~100 KLOC), similar environments (Java and .NET). One can do a full build and test in an hour, the other takes 2-3 minutes.

So what's the difference? Our analysis so far identifies database access. Both projects have a big test suite and it's the tests that take the most of the long build time, in particular the tests that access the database - about 50% of the tests.

On the short build time project, they use a object-relational mapping layer (neo) that isolates the application from the database. Only the tests for neo hit the database, most tests are all in-memory and thus much faster.