Intuitively it seems appropriate that the development environment (and all test environments) be as close to the production build as possible. Are there any documented arguments in support of this intuition?
Arguments for development environment being the same as production
development environment
It's one of the founding principles of continuous delivery that your integration tests and manual tests need to run in a production-like environment in order to have any assurance of a stable release. The more production-like your testing and staging environments are, the more confident you can be, up to and including the point of daytime fire-and-forget releases.That being said, your development environment does not need to be the same as production, and it definitely should not have production data - privacy leaks, ad-hoc updates, all sorts of problems there. Integration happens after your code leaves the development environment (specifically, in your CI environment, assuming you have one), and most teams don't run integration tests locally, so mirroring production in dev won't be that helpful since your code and unit tests are generally going to abstract away any environmental dependencies (assuming that you've designed them correctly).It is, however, useful to use the same deployment scripts for both local/dev and test/staging/prod, because it adds another layer of testing to the deployment itself and helps you refine your process. But it doesn't need to be the same. It's not really cost-effective to buy an Oracle license for every single dev box, for example, so don't count on perfect consistency.