Kathleen Murtagh (aka ceardach) talks about the deployment process at Going On and how they're using the features module to export functionality into code. Murtagh was working on a series of database scripts to handle some of the deployment process, but this has been deprecated in favor of the features module. Other modules mentioned are Organic Groups, Spaces, Devel and Masquerade.

For more information, be sure to check out the Lullabot's development workflow as described by Jerad Bitner as well as Jeff Miccolis' DrupalCon presentation named Managing and deploying configuration with exportables and the Features module