Let me tell you about one project I have been working on. It was a large embedded device, with lots of highly optimized code in C and ASM on Sharks and Blackfins. The problem was, every time you changed the code, you also had to push it on the device via FTP, then power down the device to reset it's memory, then reboot it with the new binary and reconnect your FTP and debugging host. Some of that could be automated, some not.

However, we also had a scripting interface. Update a script, tell the software to restart, done. Easy.