[solatic]

Specifically regarding your code review and QA comments, code quality is everyone's responsibility, not just management's or QA's. When development gets the idea that only QA is in charge of quality, development tends to write sloppier and sloppier code.

The real reason why this one-line change took so long is because the bureaucracy hasn't been automated away yet. Policy like not allowing magic numbers shouldn't be stuffed in a document, it should be enforced in a linting tool, and that tool ought to be runnable on the developer's workstation. If you have a QA department, QA should be spending its time writing automated tests, not maintaining and running manual tests. The developer ought to have been able to take 5 minutes to checkout the codebase, make the quick change, run the tests close to the change, and then submit to CI, which would run through the entire test suite and then continuously deploy to production. QA's approval should be built-in to the codebase and CI. Even in big companies, the process should not take longer than an afternoon.