@jvanzyl has some tooling to help with incremental building, and even integrates with M2Eclipse (possibly other IDEs too, depending how they integrate Maven): there's [Sonatype sisu-build-api](https://github.com/sonatype/sisu-build-api/blob/master/src/main/java/org/sonatype/plexus/build/incremental/BuildContext.java) and Takari promises to push it further.