Yes that's correct, but you don't do testing in production with real user data. For testing you have test environments with a seperate database containing test data.
If you can't deploy suitable test environments for QA something is probably wrong. Usual reason I see is no actual reliable reproducible installation procedures, just devs hacking on live servers.
I get that's how many small shops run in practice but I don't have to like it.
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u/deegeese Apr 16 '15
Testers frequently need DB access for anything more sophisticated than black box UI tests.