I pretty much do this habitually now:
1. Get report of bug in production or on staging.
2. Write test to reproduce the bug.
3. 2/3 of the time get stuck because the environment isn't capable of mimicking the bug.
4. Build upon the integration testing environment to make it capable of mimicking the bug.
I find the counter intuitive part of integration testing is that step 4 ends up being where most of the work is required and far too many people just don't do it because they feel it's not a worthwhile investment.
I actually ended up writing an open source framework to handle a lot of the boilerplate (which no other frameworks do AFAIK). Especially making mock devices easier to write (see http://hitchtest.com/ and check out HitchSMTP).
That's all I'm saying: tenable, but difficult (read: expensive). Frankly, I'm not convinced it is a worthwhile investment. Hence, my interest in how others have approached a similar problem.
Hitch looks pretty nifty, but I'm not sold on the yml/jinja2 approach. I grew to loathe Cucumber, and this approach seems similar. If you can't convince your non-technical staff to write tests in this language (which, in my experience, you can't), then you're better off writing the honest-to-god code that programmers are comfortable with (and can more easily modularize and refactor). YMMV I suppose!
