In your case you may want to start focusing on unit test-driven development and refactoring so that you don't have to rebuild your whole project just to impleme

In your case you may want to start focusing on unit test-driven development and refactoring so that you don't have to rebuild your whole project just to implement and test a new feature. Mocking/stubbing out the dependencies of the code unit under test will help with this too. Also, at a certain code base size you need to build abstractions and aggressively contain complexity in order to stay productive. This is the reason for Greenspun's Tenth Rule: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_tenth_rule http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_tenth_rule While humorous, it contains a kernel of truth. When complexity gets high you need to keep the project organized at a higher level, which eventually means using more sophisticated build tools, metaprogramming and/or macros to implement a DSL, or even bringing in a full-blown scripting language to write glue code that calls your core modules.