Comment by onion2k

The rest I agree with you, at least in a perfect world, but not allowed to look at production data?

For some context, the app is all about visualising corporate and legal structures at global law firms, so it's all very private and very secure. Never having access to production data to replicate issues certainly makes debugging a bit harder, but it's never been so complex that we've not been about to figure out what's happened. I've learned a lot about understanding how an application works, how data flows through it, and intuitively zeroing in on a likely problem area while I've worked on it.