Do Your Developers Have Local Admin Rights?

plover writes "I work as a developer for a Very Large American Corporation. We are not an IT company, but have a large IT organization that does a lot of internal development. In my area, we do Windows development, which includes writing and maintaining code for various services and executables. A few years ago the Info Security group removed local administrator rights from most accounts and machines, but our area was granted exceptions for developers. My question is: do other developers in other large companies have local admin rights to their development environment? If not, how do you handle tasks like debugging, testing installations, or installing updated development tools that aren't a part of the standard corporate workstation?"

Comments

Re:You damn well should

[BitZtream]

What you're describing as a developer is actually just some guy who writes code.

I don't think you're a bad support guy, most 'developers' suck. Any developer that feels like you describe is at the very best a newbie and has no clue how complex of a system he or she is dealing with, but its more likely that they are just never going to be capable of being a competent developer.

You are correct in blaming the computer gods, because sometimes its not part of your focus to figure out WHY some settings does something unexpected, your focus is to produce product. You can't dissect every bug to a root cause, sometimes the root cause is beyond your control, such as in someone elses source. When thats the case at some point you have to stop troubleshooting that problem, accept that it is a problem, work around it and move on. If it costs you 10k dollars to troubleshoot and fix a problem, or alternatively, just not fix the problem and say 'dont do that' while losing 5k in sales, then you accept the 5k loss as far better than a 10k to get a proper fix. Either way, you're out 5K in money, and one is a lot less time consuming. Of course you never really know if its going to cost you 10k to fix or that you'll lose 5k if you don't. Good developers recognize that the business isn't there to produce the perfect product, its there to produce profit.

Of course, this is slashdot, so you're going to see almost every post talking about how developers should be able to do whatever they want, and how the poster wouldn't work somewhere that didn't let them have admin rights. Pay attention closely, these guys are the unemployed ones still living in mommies basement, or probably on their way there soon.

I develop software currently on OS X, Windows and FreeBSD, and I've done Solaris development in the past. None of these OSes currently require root for developing software. You will need permission to do what you're trying to do for testing. You may need root to test a kernel module or driver, thats what test hardware (or virtual machine) on its own network is for. That separate machine makes isolating changes required in production a lot easier to find, since you start off with an image thats basically a default install to test against, so you always know what changes are required to make it work else where.

QA should always be separate from development. Developers freaking SUCK at QA. They know EXACTLY how the app is SUPPOSED to work and test all those situations it deals with. Good QA can be done with no knowledge of the application itself, and is sometimes better if the testers have no knowledge. Testers need to throw unexpected situations at the code to find out where it fails and why.