Once you have finished developing your applications and have gotten everybody invested in the project to sign off, it is time to deploy. Actually, by then, you should have already deployed the application many times and the whole process should be more or less automated.
Most of the projects in which I have been involved lately have benefited from frequently deploying the application to various environments, such as development, test, and production. Automating this process allows you to quickly get new instances of the application up and running.
Not only is this a good way of shaking out any potential problems with the eventual production deployment, it is also a great step toward having new developers be productive. If you have the deployment process optimized and well documented, new members of the development team will not have to spend countless hours setting up their development environment. Instead, they can follow some simple steps to get the application...