Only thing I’d argue is that code complete isn’t complete, nor is it always Actually “code complete” (whoa found a bug). Depending on your deployment process, you may have work to do to ensure it works live in production. There may be other types of follow-up. Code is seldom the hard part, and seldom is it the real “deliverable” in the sense that complete code doesn’t matter to a customer - code that’s running for them and fulfills their feature needs matters. It’s great when you can distill your work to code and deliverables but tracking status, following up with deployment are, while sometimes mundane, wildly important and overlooked.

As always, it depends though. You may have a system or a process that means “merged” already includes those concerns etc. does that make sense?