I am trying to understand how people manage lifecycle patching these days. I am not a sysadmin (I am a DB Architect) and what I am being told is that if there is any lag between patching a dev server and a prod server that we will liley get new patches in prod that have not had any soak time in dev. Back when I did do sysadmin work, we downloaded the set of patches being applied in dev and then applied them to prod from our patch repository. IS this not done anymore?

I appreciate any help that can be offered to bring me up to speed on how patching is managed these days.