Daily builds combine nicely with the use of miniature milestones (Chapter 27). As Chris Peters says, "Scheduling rule #1 is constant vigilance" (Peters 1995). If you have defined a complete set of mini milestones and you know that your daily build is not broken, then you will have exceptional visibility into your progress. You can check the build every single day to determine whether your project is meeting its mini milestones. If it is meeting its mini milestones, it will finish on time. If it is falling behind, you will detect that immediately, and you can adjust your plans accordingly. The only kind of scheduling error you can make is to leave tasks off the schedule.

Daily builds also provide support for incremental-development practices (Chapter 7). Those practices depend on being able to release interim versions of the software externally. The effort required to prepare a good build for release is relatively small compared to the effort needed to convert an average, infrequently built program into a good build.