Maven

Apache Maven is a software project management and build process tool. Maven uses concept of project object model(POM) to manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece/server.

Things I liked,

1. Write little in fact very little build instructions. - Trick is to follow standard folder structure based on the archetype chosen war, ear & jar etc. Which means quite a lot of discipline across projects.
2. Don't worry about checking in jar which are commonly used in projects, maven can get it for you from maven repository. Lot of checking time, memory, version conflicts and backup could be avoided.
   
3. Custom archetype creation.
4. Natural integration with unit testing tools, put the test case in rite place it taken care of running it for you.
5. Project report generation.
6. Maven plug-in for eclipse (Eclipse IAM) is cool to work with reduces lot of manual interventions.

In spite of all the nice features and hassle free project build management, very little adoption in service industry other than the open source world. I guess people are comfortable writing ant scripts for some strange reasons :( .

Try maven in 5 minutes .

Reference
http://maven.apache.org/