I been using LDAP for alot of years now and most of the firms I worked for LDAP schema in development looks just like the schema in production, QA(Staging).
etc: suffix "dc=firm,dc=com"
I just started working at a new firm a few months ago and the SA is telling me I am doing it wrong that in development the suffix should be suffix "dc=firm,dc=dev".
I feel that this is going to make a lot of issues don't the road with programming and moving data for testing etc etc. I would like to get some views on this. I see this a data and it should look like production, qa etc etc
What the "suffix" (actually the "naming context") is should not matter. Any code should be completely independent of the contents of the directory, where the directory is located (from a networking point of view, what software the server runs, what version that software is, etc. Any code that "knows" these sorts of things is poor code, is not robust, is fragile, and is prone to failures.