[resonious]

Indeed, I found the "We only merge code that is ready to go live" part odd. It seems unrelated to the presence of absence of a staging environment. Where I work, we use staging and also only merge code that is ready to go live.

Similarly, "Poor ownership of changes" and "People mistakenly let process replace accountability" just don't seem staging-related to me. I've been in environments where people throw code over the fence straight into production.

[lbriner]

The way I read that is, if you have a staging environment, it is someone else's job to test things before they deploy (Product Manager etc.) which allows them to merge it and forget it. I agree if it is the dev's job then it wouldn't make sense.

The other issue that is fair is the potential lag between dev and production if you have a gate at staging. This way, a developer is likely to move onto something else instead of watching their baby swim into production with all the errors that could cause!

[relaxing]

Why would you merge code that wasn’t ready to go live?