What does it mean to finish a task? Who must finish it? These seem like obvious questions. People often think that writing code, adding tests, sending for code review is enough. But there are still steps before it ships to production. Developers think that code reviewer will merge their task and release manager will release it. But what happens if people will just forget to merge it? What if they forget to merge it, but will move the task to the next column? The task will "fall on the floor". It will be lost and forgotten. It may even have a DONE status in issue tracker. But in reality it will never ship to production. Who is responsible for it? Code reviewer? QA engineer? Release manager? Team lead? They are all responsible, but for specific stages of issue's lifecycle. What happens if it was the last day of work of a code reviewer and he forgot to merge the task? Let's imagine a team lead gets fired. How their superior will know about this incomplete task? And they won't push this task to production themselves - after all, they're managers. So if someone will notice that the task wasn't done, the burden of pushing it to production will still fall on the developer. If their still with the company, of course. I think that the developer should be responsible for making sure the task is shipped to production. Yes, they might not always have all needed permissions - but that's not needed. They just need to keep an eye on the task. Yes, I think all levels of developers need to be responsible - not only senior or middle. Even juniors. Yes, they're only learning, and need more control. But this doesn't cancel the fact that they need to be responsible now and in the future. Was my merge request merged? Was it included in a release? Did someone enable a feature flag for this functionality (if applicable)? Can users access and use this functionality? Is it working as expected? This is the best possible scenario. QA can't track all tasks - they have a stream of such tasks. Developers by definition spend way more time with the task. And usually they don't have a hundred tasks a day. Still, it's a good practice to check if you have unmerged Pull Requests, from time to time. What would happen if: There was an important feature The developer would receive a bonus if it was released The merge request was reviewed and tested The task was moved to DONE But Merge Request was never merged Would they receive the bonus? I don't think so. From the business standpoint, the task wasn't done. This developer didn't ship it, or didn't make sure it shipped. I think it's fair to pay for what was done: developed AND reviewed AND tested AND shipped. No shipment, no bonus. No arms, no chocolate.