[throwawayninja]

The QA team brings something significant that developers (myself) will never have: their machines closely represent the customers machines. They use a well-polished methodology to push the models we ship to their limits and provide relatively detailed information about how to reproduce failures.

I can't count the number of times I've tested something 5 times, convinced myself that the code handled tons of error cases, shipped it, and in 10 minutes a customer types "five" into a field expecting an integer which causes the next step to use "0" for processing.

[jbjbjbjb]

Well their methodology isn’t magic. It’s a skill a developer can learn.

[aynawn]

why don't the dev machines also closely represent customer set ups?