release and test targets

[Jacobs, Brendan D.]

I'm working w/ a software development group. We've been using automake
for the past year, and it's worked quite well for us.  However, we're
coming up to a release in the next few months, and we're realizing that
it would be very nice to have user targets for test/debug builds vs.
release/production builds.  We'd like to be able to do "make test" and
"make release", and have automake just make the make release libraries
and programs versus using test programs, respectively.  Is there any
support for user-specified targets?  Or, can you recommend another way
to accomplish this w/ the current 1.92 version of automake?   
 
By the way, beside release builds, we're after a decrease in build time.
We'd really like the "make release" to shorten our build time by only
building the non-test directories.  
 
Thanks in advance.