[casual_slacker]

We used a similar trick, not for testing, but the ability to download the prod database and debug things locally. We hit scaling issues before PII, so coworker built a system to generate real-ish DBs with only one customer's data. And then in a future version, sensitive fields were filtered or replaced with mock data. Not sure if there are better, less engineering effort ways of doing this, but it was a great tool when debugging.

[icoe]

Makes a lot of sense. I actually think leveraging your prod data to create a test environment is one of the best approaches, as long as you're mindful of privacy. Full disclosure: I'm a founder of tonic.ai and we make tools to make it easier to create synthetic staging instances from production environments.