Continuous Integration
Once I got the staging instance operational "continuous integration" kicked in. In this case this is the Continuous Builder plugin for Rails which is run every time a commit is made to the rhubarb_on_rails Subversion repository and svn up's the code then runs the full test suite. On test failure it sends an email notification to its' configured targets.
What it doesn't do and I quite like is something I added to the continuous integration script ThoughtWorks made for the Melt project and I added to - that script keeps a web page updated with the status (success or failure) of each build. I'll try and add this to the Continuous Builder plugin and submit my changes back to the rails community.