Does my development environment mirror user's environment?

Question

I am trying to get a better idea on this as so far I have had mixed answers in person.

I am a solo dev in a 5 man IT dept for a Health Care related business. My developer machine is running Win 7 RC1 (x64) but my users are all running Win XP Pro (x86). Is this a big deal? Whan kind of pitfalls should I be aware of? Is having a VM of the user image enough?

Should my environment completely mirror my end user's?

Answer 1

Your development environment doesn't need to mirror your user's environment, but your testing environment certainly should!

Having a VM of the users image for testing would probably be good enough.