I agree with you, Steve, at least in principal. And its one we've recently adopted here. But we're also experiencing a lot of push back by the users. The first big pushback is from a third party app we've got. We paid dearly for this app. It has some serious UI/UX issues, one of which is for the most part it doesn't allow the user to change anything they save. Of course, since humans are using it, they're going to make mistakes. And its then incumbent upon a colleague and I to fix to myriad number of errors entered by users. To do this we have to run one of about 40 different SQL scripts the vendor provided. (Why they didn't bother to fix the app instead of supply SQL scripts to fix errors, is beyond me.) And the supervisor of users requires us to restore production to test so we can first run one of the SQL scripts in test and he can verify that its OK. Then we do the same thing to production. But there is no way he will work with anonymized data! He has made that abundantly clear and forced the issue. So, the best we can do is delete all of the data out of test, after this laborious task is completed.

The second thing is getting users to test changes we make in applications we're writing or enhancements we're making to existing applications. I know, from experience since adopting the idea of anonymizing data, that you know what can freeze over before any user will run and test changes. Thus no feedback. Or I should say none until deadlines pressure us to release the changes. Then you won't believe how loud users scream because they don't like what they see. Its a losing situation for us. Honestly, I don't like this at all. I'd like to know if anyone knows of a way out of this path to frustration.