Not true. Worked on a real distributed payment system. Every service came with a mock clone or a single server mode to standup all services in the same box. Every developer had a powerful personal desktop (or two). I loved it. Everyone I knew there loved it.
See comment below. Just because it wasn't true for you, doesn't mean it's not true. I'm not talking about mocking services to run it; I'm talking about the development environment and sharing with a team of 20 or so on a code base that takes 45 minutes to compile without parallelizing the build. You also cannot mock GPU functions. There's simply no cuda emulator.
This is an ideal case and I wish it's like this for everybody. At least one of the payment providers I'm working with in a customer's project doesn't even have a sandbox. We must test with real money. Obviously we mock everything in unit and integration tests, but to know that it really works the customer must put money on the manual testing account.
