Maintaining install profiles I am constantly having to maintain drush make files of contributed modules. Drupal.org used to display which modules were out of date on the dev release node, which made it easy, but that's gone now. I asked another distribution maintainer at Drupalcon a few weeks ago, and he just used the update status list. That works, but it's annoying to wait for the updates locally, sometimes having to run cron, and a little tedious to go through all the list of modules.
I've looked in drush for a command to list all the modules with the new versions, but for some reason I never found drush upc - probably because I wasn't planning to actually update all the modules through drush. Adding an -n flag stops the update but still returns the information:
drush upc -n | grep 'Update available'
This returns a nice list of the modules that need to be updated:
Backup and Migrate 7.x-2.5 7.x-2.7 Update available
Colorbox 7.x-1.5 7.x-1.6 Update available
ImageCache Actions 7.x-1.1 7.x-1.3 Update available
Location 7.x-3.0-alpha8 7.x-3.0-rc1 Update available
OpenLayers 7.x-2.0-beta5 7.x-2.0-beta7 Update available
Flag 7.x-2.0 7.x-2.1 Update available
Twitter 7.x-5.7 7.x-5.8 Update available
Webform 7.x-3.18 7.x-3.19 Update available