That was the case for the company that I worked at. The official QA organization was very powerful, and had no compunctions about stopping an entire product li

That was the case for the company that I worked at. The official QA organization was very powerful, and had no compunctions about stopping an entire product line, for one bug. When that happened, the department responsible for the bug would find themselves against the wall. As a result, all the software departments had pretty big teams of testers, who would validate the software, before it was released to the purview of the QA organization. It could be pretty restricting, but we always felt confident that what we shipped, worked.