Is there a way to test programs with less compilation time?

I guess it's not, as you always have to compile to test a program, but I want to ask just in case. I've been making some c++ projects, and I thought, "wow, this takes too much time to compile" and it was a render program which wasn't way too big, I cannot imagine how much time could it take to test programs way bigger.

So that's it, is there some way?