A commenter wrote about my posting What industrial America can learn from high-tech product cycles:  "my personal opinion is that it's the other way around, since software development processes learned a lot from Toyota practices (lean manufacturing, kanban, just-in-time etc.)"  That is very true.  The process that we use at Assembla is descended from the car business.

I started thinking about daily builds almost 20 years ago when I read Kim Clark's book about designing cars. One of the main points of the book was that Nissan could design a car much faster than GM because they made a prototype and kept it up to date every day - a daily build. They used this technique to coordinate a global process by engaging suppliers to build the parts of the prototype for as many iterations as were required.  

We do the same thing with software now. 

Follow this link to read Product Development Performance , published in 1991 by Kim Clark and Takahiro Fujimoto.