Comment by swiftcoder

> That is all part of doing the thing called quality software develeopment

It's all part of doing software development on a team that has embraced the trappings of agile, at any rate. Less clear that any of these steps are actually essential to quality.

There are teams who use a workflow that looks more like push-to-merge-queue -> if-tests-pass -> deploy-to-prod, and in my experience this results in significantly higher velocity (provided your e2e tests are actually sufficient to prevent outages).