DAST is a set of build projects, tasks and other extensions created on the Phing framework for automating a wide variety of Drupal deployment and staging scenarios. The goal of DAST is to provide a formal, repeatable, reusable process for 'building' a Drupal site using a formal build tool and build language. DAST applies the concept of the software build to creating Drupal sites...Phing build files are syntactically identical to Ant build files and provide tasks for downloading Drupal core and modules from CVS, copying and deleting files and directories, creating the Drupal database and user, writing to configuration files, and generally any of the manual steps that users / developers / testers / admins repeatdly perform to bootstrap a new Drupal site.

For developers and testers if you're tired of the download/untar/drop/create database routine and you want to automate testing patches and modules then you're in the right place. If you're looking for a tool for Drupal build management and to do stuff like automated unit testing and code coverage reports, and anything that can be done to make Drupal's developers lives easier and improve code quality, you're also in the right place.