You've been there.  You're getting close to release.  Your team is working crazy hours, they're patching bugs left and right, your documenation team is swearing at everyone for making changes,  your former Marine boss is spending a lot of time cleaning her weapons... and your PR people have one question for you:

What's in this release?

Oh... crap.  So how can you figure out what was done?  How can you figure out what's in this release?

First, hopefully you have a list of everything that went into this iteration.  We usually use the Categories in Mediawiki to keep the relevant User Stories grouped together.  With a click we can see the relevant User Stories without a problem.  For new functionality, this works well and we're able to keep things well-documented and straight.

Next, ask your team members.  If you've been doing daily standups or any sort of task reporting, they probably have a list of things they've done.  They will remember the particularly annoying/difficult things that they've worked on... and the things they're proud of.  Just ask.

Next, check your bug tracking system.  You have a bug tracking system right?  Or at least a todo list of everything that came up during this release, right?  Although we have Trac functional, the simplicity and speed of Basecamp still has it beat.  As the system and the team grows, we'll probably have to convert...

Finally, you can check your commit logs.  This is the most painful and tedious.  If you require useful commit comments, it will be less painful but will be incredibly time-consuming.  Regardless, it is the most complete way to find everything.

Unfortunately, this most recent time around, we had to do a bit of all four things.  During our day to day usage and via user feedback, we found a number of small things that simply didn't make it to the point of being logged.  Luckily, since each release is centered around 1-2 new things, it was easier than expected...

• Feature: New invites system!
• Fix: Publish Time now editable on blog post edit page
• Fix: Profile image thumbnails are viewable even if the user is non-public so that wall comments and friends lists do not have broken image links
• Improvement: Changed how the front page decides which five new users to view;  It used to be random among all users, and now it is a random five of the 100 most recent members with public profiles
• Fix: Future posts do not show up in the archives
• Improvement: Fixed navigation bar on group community listings page
• Fix: Handshake history improvements
• Fix: Minor miscellaneous HTML fixes

As I write this, we're solidifying the last few things for the next release:  Boone.  And the list is already looking pretty good... ;)