[K0nserv]

Extending his argument further. Strive to have a local environments that is as close to production as possible. Use Memcache in production? Use Memcache for dev/testing too! Use Elasticsearch in production? Use Elasticsearch in dev/testing!

This is all really simple to setup to. Think about how a new developer gets up to speed and starts coding in your company. Does it involve downloading and installing Postgres.app[0]? If it does it's no good. Starting a local environment should require a single command. `vagrant up` is one option if you use vagrant. Local environments should ideally use the same method of provisioning as production servers. It can however be simpler, one of our codebases has a bootstrap.sh file that sets everything up, it works surprisingly well. No version conflicts, no weird bugs due to slightly varying versions for different developers and no fake service such as SQLLite.

For the life of me I can't understand the test speed issues that people talk about. We have a pretty small codebase with some 2k test(94% coverage). That takes about 6-7 minutes to run inside a vagrant VM using all the same services as production. 6-7 minutes is a long time, but you shouldn't be running your whole test suite during development. During development only run the one or two tests that are relevant for the feature you are building or the bug you are fixing. These are typically really fast even with a proper database. The whole test suite should be ran before pushing and by CI. If your database is still too slow look at using a RAMdisk or tweaking the configuration like people have suggested in the comments

0: http://postgresapp.com/