> As you can imagine that incentivized only fixing important bugs, and even those we had to consider whether it was worth it or not.

Or you're batching your releases into larger builds because you know it'll take 6 weeks to test regardless. This increases the duration of each development iteration because you have 100 things you want to do and you could do that in, say, 4x13 week efforts, but with the added 6 weeks between iterations (and possibly more after it leaves your shop) that takes a one year effort and turns it into about 1.5. So the program office decides you should do one big release each year, which also ups the risk because a lot of testing that would catch bugs isn't done until the end in that big 6-week test effort. Oops, now your 1 year + 6 week effort just got turned into 1 year + 6 week + (unknown rework time) + 6 weeks. Probably 2 years.

My last job was like this, a full round of QAs manually testing, along with writing up a grandiose release document, stakeholder approvals, and whatnot, for something that should just take two days of development work, and an insistence on putting configuration values into the database, supposedly because it's "safer" than deploying a new configuration file.