After the SCons phase of the compile task completes, we spend something like 6 minutes doing post-build packaging and uploading tasks. Many of these tasks are not actual prerequisites for starting to run off-box tests. Moving them to a post-compile phase would allow those tasks to run concurrently with initiating off-box testing.

Not all parts can be elided: we still need at least the "binaries" and "archive.tgz" artifacts to get created.

However, it seems likely that the following long running tasks could be parallelized:

• Generating rpm and deb packages
• Uploading the debug symbols archive to s3
• Creating other tarfiles like the shell archive.

Making these changes would both allow off-box testing to start a few minutes faster, as well as make the timing of the 'compile' task more reflective of the actual time spent compiling.