I agree wholeheartedly about the importance culture over process. I live in a process-heavy environment, but I still think that culture matters more.
Where process definitely helps is in finding those bugs that can't be found "by use of the code." i.e., the bug will be experienced by the user, but it may be invisible to the developer. In just the last year, we've uncovered two nasty race conditions that have been in our codebase for almost a decade, but only just started to show up because some unrelated code changed the timing of certain behaviors. Even having knowledge of the problem (thank heavens for good log files!!), we could not design tests to verify that the bugs were fixed: the windows of opportunity were just too small. Code inspection was the only way to verify that the fix matched the problem.
Where process definitely helps is in finding those bugs that can't be found "by use of the code." i.e., the bug will be experienced by the user, but it may be invisible to the developer. In just the last year, we've uncovered two nasty race conditions that have been in our codebase for almost a decade, but only just started to show up because some unrelated code changed the timing of certain behaviors. Even having knowledge of the problem (thank heavens for good log files!!), we could not design tests to verify that the bugs were fixed: the windows of opportunity were just too small. Code inspection was the only way to verify that the fix matched the problem.