[rcxdude]

Sure, for integration with some specific hardware, there may be some limits (though I would ask if that could be simulated for most testing, or if multiple could be made available). But it's a goal that should be aimed for and is achievable for most software, if some effort is spent on it. I see a lot of places seem to cargo-cult a dev/staging/prod setup (each of which inevitably winds up slightly different and hard to reproduce for incidental reasons) and it seems like an approach with a lot of headaches that you probably don't want to use unless you're forced to.