There is a lot of activity that happens in the release of an application. The release begins its life when management has some recognition that a new release of a project is needed. The release gets frozen when management decides that its list of related requirements is complete. The release gets approved once its use-cases, test plans, and designs have all been approved (including related task estimates). The release is considered complete by management when the rate of new defects injected by the QA engineers is precipitously falling and the rate of defects removed by the developers is precipitously rising. Throw in the all too human emotions of user neediness counter acted by fear and loathing by all parties and I hope that you can agree with me that this is a very subjective event. When it does happen, and it will, there is cause for celebration before it is time to start working on the next release.