Dev team with no QA resources

Right now in my organization, there are completely independent roles for QA and Dev. QA vs Development ratio is always an open issue, specially in crucial prod releases :P


In my office, we are thinking about DEV without QA i.e. push releases on prod without/partial help of QA. 


Overall idea is avoid QA using either TDD, peer programming or peer code review etc. 


Here are few key notes ( my worries :P however they are very subjective, but based on experience)

1. Can developers really be effective testers, with their intimate knowledge of the application?
2. Can developers could be a good "bug finders" rather than engineers.
3. People are often blind to their own shortcomings or mistakes, and developed code is best validated when tested by third parties. Of course, proper monitoring and management of this process could mitigate the process...but it's a concern.
4. Can developer think high visibility prospective. Sometimes a customer relationship can be impaired by simple usability flaws -- a somewhat common mistake for an immature developer.
5. Increases the chance for rework
6. Leads time involved more on testing application or module

However following are few parameters which helps.


How much unit testing the developers are doing. The more they do, the less QA dependency.


How much the developers are writing from scratch versus leveraging existing libraries. If there is a lot of pre-existing code in use then its disappointing call.


How dynamic the development is. If you are writing a UI where relatively small developer tweaks cause a large change to the testable surface then it would be pain.


How mission critical the feature is. It need a lot more testing because bugs are hard to fix in the field and very bad when they happen.