R – Does the development environment mirror user’s environment

development-environment

I am trying to get a better idea on this as so far I have had mixed answers in person.

I am a solo dev in a 5 man IT dept for a Health Care related business. My developer machine is running Win 7 RC1 (x64) but my users are all running Win XP Pro (x86). Is this a big deal? Whan kind of pitfalls should I be aware of? Is having a VM of the user image enough?

Should my environment completely mirror my end user's?

Best Answer

Your development environment doesn't need to mirror your user's environment, but your testing environment certainly should!

Having a VM of the users image for testing would probably be good enough.

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