Is there a central / core team that reviews architecture and/or code of the applications (at request)?
Pushing code to production is not a one-step process. It has at least two phases: first push code to the repository, then build the binary and push the binary to production.
Pushing code to the repository requires code review: most reviewers are your peers or owners if you work in other team's codebase. So really no central team to review code. Reviewing architecture, maybe, but it depends on the impact of the system to change.
Pushing binary to production doesn't really need review in normal case, assuming there is a good binary/release qualification and a good release rollout system, all can be automated. Emergency push to production may need a second pair of eyes but it also depends on the urgency.
Some companies have dedicated test engineers while at others it’s the responsibility of each engineer to write tests for their changes and the tests are reviewed as part of the same process.
Plug: I’m working on a much better code review tool for teams who live on GitHub. If you’re interested check out https://codeapprove.com or send me an email at Sam at habosa dot com
- Implement feature locally and unit test it
- Push to codebase is gated by code review
- Integration tests
- System tests
- Delivered to customer release by release
- Customer's acceptance tests
- Deployed
In principle I would expect a significant level of testing before pushing to production.