Similar question:

• How do you dive into large code bases?

I have always worked on small projects where editing a piece of code is easy: you modify the code, you recompile and in a matter of seconds you can play around with the compiled program.

Everyday one may end up doing the "edit compile try" loop hundreds if not thousands of times.

Some codebases however (e.g chromium) are huge, and require minutes to compile.

How do software engineers manage to efficently work on such large codebases? Do they recompile every time they make a small edit?