Development process best practices suggest to define a reference environment for testing and promotion configurations to the next step of development lifecycle, to ensure that local configurations aren't masking defects in the official implementation. This is normally addressed with continuous integration tools such as CruiseControl or Continuum, often integrated with Ant or Maven. The common notion is to have a separate build machine to be used as a reference environment taking source files directly from the SCM system. This way you can ensure that reference environments works regardless bad influence of developers that move far away from the baseline, by avoiding to commit or update for a long time.

A more interesting way to solve this problem tough, is to randomly choose a reference environment: stating that "This week, production environment will be aligned with... Bob's machine!!" or whoever. And once the choice is made, pour the code straight to production. You'll get sure that developers start running test on their machines...

Labels: continuous integration, test driven development