Please see the bottom of this page for links to several resources. (click read more!)
Building software is a list of steps needed to take source code, images, other things called artifacts into something useful.

Critical Best Practices:
1) Software reproducibility
2) Decoupling your process from your hardware
3) Build early and often
4) Combine technology with the human process

Here is a text of a podcast from IBM and Sundeep Goel. He makes several good points.

When you actually build an application you will need to maintain it. This means even though you working on 2007.5 version of your code, somebody with 2005.2 might need you to rebuild the application.