Another side benefit is that it generally leads to higher quality releases and more stability, for a few reasons:<p>1) If you can do quick, easy releases, people release small, narrowly-scoped changes instead of huge batches of changes that may interact with each other in all sorts of unknown ways.<p>2) If you need to fix something, having a process that lets you release quickly and easily means you can get a fix deployed that much sooner. I hate being in a situation where an emergency patch that is really small still takes hours to get out.