Matt Gertz of the Visual Basic team has posted an excellent discussion describing the release process for Microsoft's product development teams.  Often as a presenter I'm asked 'how does Microsoft do it?'.  Matt's post does an excellent job of talking about the project management details of managing quality for a product release.

http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2007/08/27/endgame-matt-gertz.aspx