You think 15 minutes is a long time? Hour-long builds were standard on a previous project I worked on, and I've heard of much worse.

What I do if the build takes too long is work out how to make it faster. :)

I like to randomly strip out sections of code to see if it improves the build times. :)

Sometimes it's so fast, it's as if it doesn't even build at all!

You could try the so called unity builds, or including few cpp files in one file to reduce the amount of code that is being parsed.

so

Texture.cpp Buffer.cpp Shader.cpp becomes

Texture.cpp.inl Buffer.cpp.inl Shader.cpp.inl and you create a brand new cpp
the_real_cpp.cpp that containes:

#include "Texture.cpp.inl"
#include "Buffer.cpp.inl"
#include "shader.cpp.inl"

It works pretty well. Be aware of hidden global variables that my exist per translation unit. We did not have any so it went fine for us.(this is what I do for my D3D/GL wrapper classes).

Another thing that people do (but I do not approve) is precompiled headers, they surely work but in my humble experience shows that the PHC becomes a mega header that includes everything.

Additionally if you can hunt down all the includes to heavy headers like <iostream> <windows.h> <d3d11.h> and isolate them would be very benefitial.

And of course the usual "extern template-ing" and moving functions to *.cpp files, forward declaring whenever possible etc.

EDIT:

Additionally you could try converting some macros to functions and moving the implementation to a cpp file. @work we write plugins for Maya and we had a commonly used macro that checked the returned by Maya MStatus for errors. A college of mine change that form a macro to a function and that reduced the compile times by ~30%(unsed MSVC compiler, no change in gcc clang icl) so it was pretty big.

I like to go through header files, comment out all the #includes, and then add them back in only if a forward declaration won't suffice. Start with the most important headers and see if it makes a difference. The other thing is to split things out into more files, so that a higher proportion of the project files remain untouched (and thus never recompiled) during development of any single feature.

I remember that myhandmadehero dude saying some thing like if your building time is taking more than 15 sec, doesnt matter how big is the project, youre doing something wrong, he was very enfatic in that (he wasnt just throwing words)..anyone agree with that?