SD Times has an article on Agile Development vs. Build process - their contention is that build tools lag behind methodologies and the IDEs:

“Teams that want to be more agile are headed for a train wreck if they have long build times; they’ll need to find ways to build all or part of the software more frequently to get the kind of continuous feedback that helps agile teams move quickly,” said Clark, who hasn’t used BuildForge. “But I don’t see that as a tool problem as much as it’s a build process problem. That is, I don’t think tools will help as much as getting someone on the team to optimize the build process will.”

Optimization may be easier said than done. New languages and libraries ooze increasing amounts of code while the 20-year-old Make-based infrastructure lags behind advanced IDEs. Worse, ongoing coding projects create deeply recursive and dependency-laden groups of Makefiles that only a conjurer can untangle.

While Smalltalk doesn't suffer from the complexity of "Make" (et. al.), builds can get to be complicated - we had a number of conversations about this at ESUG last week. When I posted my build process for BottomFeeder recently, the first comment I saw was "it's too complicated". This is an area that the entire industry - including my end of it - needs to improve.