Soft Orders of Magnitude
If there’s one safe thing to complain about for any software development process, it’s that build times are too long. It doesn’t matter if it’s a minute, five minutes, or a hour—it could always be shorter. No one’s going to argue with that, right?
What we came to realize was that absolute or percentage speedups, while obviously important, weren’t going to change how someone used the tool unless it crossed a “soft order of magnitude”.