Everybody has a test/dev environment. Some of us are lucky to have a separate production environment :)

Everybody has a test/dev environment. Some of us are lucky to have a separate production environment :)

It's all about framing...

I certainly like your way of framing that!

I must say, in that front i spent a lot of work hours in the last year to make that work. A year ago, just installing the dev environment for my commercial software took ~6 hours (you had to edit config files, in addition to installing a LOT of dependencies and do some complicated database magic).

Now i can get a blank computer up and running in about an hour, including installing Xubuntu. 90 minutes at the most. Depending mostly on how slow the Ubuntu and CPAN servers are at that moment. (Add another 30 minutes if the computer is for myself, hand-massaging the keyboard layout setup takes a few minutes, and i always mess up the first round and need a second reboot).

These days, none of my co-developers has any excuse for not running at least one test setup. I made it extremely easy to change which local test database to use by just setting a single environment variable and restarting the software...

And if any of the non-developers want to test the software (which they are required to if they have time on their hands), there is a central server and all you need is to connect with your browsers. Or grab one of the two hardware cash registers (with integrated touchscreens). Or grab one of the three pre-configured Android phones with matching bluetooth printers. All updated weekly with the freshest development version.

Everyone and their dog and their supervisor at $company has access to the test environment. If an obvious bug makes it to the customer, nobody at work has any excuse.

As i said, it took a lot of work. But it certainly improved both the software quality as well as the general understanding of what the dev team does on a day-to-day basis.

PerlMonks XP is useless? Not anymore: XPD - Do more with your PerlMonks XP

https://github.com/everything2/everything2
My understanding is that a lot of what people might complain about - particularly, code being in the database - has been changed in the E2 engine. Worth checking out.