I think there is a lot to be said about the attitude of a tester. Imagine you are one of those cops on one of the really hardcore cop shows and you’ve got some chump under arrest. You know he did it, but you have no evidence. Is your conversation going to go like this?
You: So….did you commit the crime?
Chump: No way man. I mean okay, so I may have beat the guy up a little but that probably didn’t really kill him.
You: Only a little, hey. Well that’s good enough, I’m happy to release you back into society. Charges dismissed!
Yeah, basically your application is a criminal. You don’t want to release someone like that into society until you know he’s not going to get up to any funny business. And heck, if you’ve got any evidence at all that he might be guilty, you’re not going to just go “let’s just put him out there and see if he commits a crime and we’ll just bring him back in” now are you? Heck no, you’re going to raise hell until that chump is behind bars or at least doing some horrible community service or somesuch (not really sure what community service is a metaphor for here but just work with me).
Oh, and if anyone ever says “It’s an environmental thing, it won’t happen in production”, that’s your cue to throw a big tantrum. How are you meant to test something if it’s not working properly on the test server? Get your test server fixed to match production, or at the very least test out the system in a different environment to see if it’ll work. Are you going to say “this criminal may be stabbing people in jail but in the real world he’ll be fine”? Where’s your evidence of that?