First off I have seen this post which is slightly similar to my question. :

What can you do to decrease the number of deployment bugs of a live website?

Let me layout the situation for you. The team of programmers that I belong to have metrics associated with our code. Over the last several months our errors in our live system have increased by a large amount. We require that our updates to applications be tested by at least one other programmer prior to going live. I personally am completely against this as I think that applications should be tested by end users as end users are much better testers than programmers, I am not against programmers testing, obviously programmers need to test code, but they are most of the times too close to the code. The reason I specify that I think end users should test in our scenario is due to the fact that we don't have business analysts, we just have programmers. I come from a background where BAs took care of all the testing once programmers checked off it was ready to go live.

We do have a staging environment in place that is a clone of the live environment that we use to ensure that we don't have issues between development and live environments this does catch some bugs.

We don't do end user testing really at all, I should say we don't really have anyone testing our code except programmers, which I think gets us into this mess (Ideally, we would have BAs or QA or professional testers test). We don't have a QA team or anything of that nature. We don't have test cases for our projects that are fully laid out.

Ok, I am just a peon programmer at the bottom of the rung, but I am probably more tired of these issues than the managers complaining about them. So, I don't have the ability to tell them you are doing it all wrong.....I have tried gentle pushes in the correct direction.

Any advice or suggestions on how to alleviate this issue is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.