[random_rr]

Haha. Okay. I would hazard a guess that you haven't worked on real world apps then. Users will do things that you cannot predict. They will break things like never before.

I've written plenty of code that checks out against out test environment, but it'll choke on a weird thing in production. You NEED access to real data if you're going to make any progress in that scenario.

[enraged_camel]

Yep, precisely. And it's not just the users that fuck up either. Sometimes, other systems you have to integrate with are also poorly designed and don't have proper control mechanisms in place. For instance, I'm working on integrating with another system right now where the zip_code field has values like "don't know". You're never going to be able to cover for things like that unless you have access to the real dataset.