Code quality is largely dictated by the client. And at times people who basically 'sign off' your code, Pretty much every project will have their own checklist, there won't be a common checklist because of legal copyrights and contractual things preventing things getting shared out of your project. So it depends on what the client demands. But there are very strict SLA's though(Based on what the client wants). I never recall a single instance when we shipped anything without unit test cases, UAT's and elaborate regression testing.

Automation is a trendy and people get awarded prizes all the time for writing tools that save time and improve quality.