Developers won’t test if it’s too hard

I've noticed two qualities in dev environments I like:

1. They give me confidence my code will work in prod

2. They give me really fast feedback

These dev envs let you get into the flow and enjoy coding, while producing high quality code. On the other hand, I tend to cut corners if I have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to test.

Recently, I've realized that these traits are in tension. For example, staging environments are very similar to production, but are slow to test in.

I wrote this blog post to explore why it’s hard to have both qualities, and some compromises I’ve seen teams make: https://kelda.io/blog/fundamental-tradeoffs-in-dev-environments/

How do you feel about your dev envs? Are there areas of your codebase that you avoid because the testing process is annoying?