It's not so much about the environment itself, but the data in it. If the data you use for your tests is all hand crafted/manually created by someone who has left the company then you don't have any way to scale it (e.g. if you want to run a bunch of your tests in parallel and they may modify that data), or to make changes to address new functionality in your application, then your qa process will suffer immensely.
I wish people would think about the data they use for the tests a bit more, and how they can create it from scratch in a consistent and scalable way, that way they can always be testing against a clean environment with a known setup and avoid doing a bunch of bad things (like creating data on the fly as part of a test)
I wish people would think about the data they use for the tests a bit more, and how they can create it from scratch in a consistent and scalable way, that way they can always be testing against a clean environment with a known setup and avoid doing a bunch of bad things (like creating data on the fly as part of a test)