Yeah, I don't think Ops is proud of this, but from my understanding, it's very difficult to develop for puppet without committing and seeing what happens. It's possible, but it's definitely not as productive.
That's not true anymore. It's been possible to fully test puppet manifests before committing for over a month, now. Nearly two weeks ago, we even got rid of the test branch in favor of pushing fully finished changes into the production branch. This assumes that this piece of infrastructure is in Labs, of course.
- Ryan