I've worked in a couple of companies that did this. We had the following flow and it worked great:
Task assigned to developer via email, developer takes current release tar from ftp and untars, does work, creates patch, forwards patch to colleague to review, forwards to release manager who integrates all incoming patches, drops into a new tar, releases to ftp.
Some of this was automated with a few hundred lines of perl. The rest was on a whiteboard.
Task assigned to developer via email, developer takes current release tar from ftp and untars, does work, creates patch, forwards patch to colleague to review, forwards to release manager who integrates all incoming patches, drops into a new tar, releases to ftp.
Some of this was automated with a few hundred lines of perl. The rest was on a whiteboard.