Steve Freeman blogged only some minutes ago about Kent Beck mentioning a team somewhere [too much indirection already?] that...

...has become so good at delivery that they can release to production from the development desktop. No testing cycle, no staging environment, no sign-off; straight to production -- and this is a serious mission-critical system. Obviously, it takes a while for a team to build up that kind of reliability and trust, they have a track record of near-zero errors in the live system. Think how fast they can go [1].
...
[1] A measure of the sophistication of the team is that they don't work on production code when they feel tired or burnt-out, they know it's not worth it. I know of hardly any organizations that understand this.

While I'm not sure I know what it feels like to deploy "mission critical" systems to production straight from my desktop (I've only done that for non-essential funds type of stuff), I can certainly respect the wisdom this particular organization is exhibiting by having their developers work on the critical stuff only when they're at their best.