Hello again!
Today I got reminded that not matter what anyone tells you, there is no such thing as a temporary feature. Once you've added it to your system, even as a hidden setting, your support staff will talk about it, and soon customers will ask about it, and it's not long until someone depends on it, and after that, you're getting enhancement requests for it.
So when you are writing the code for that kludge that one collaborator needs just to get things past integration testing, you need to think like this will be a fully-supported, documented feature, because it soon will be.
Don't use an environment variable when you have a database. If you can't add it to your database immediately, write the code to make it easy to convert when you do get a chance to change the schema.
Don't expect it to be ok to set this once at process start and never re-read the value until the next restart.
Don't slip the code change into a side branch of execution that suits just that one customer/collaborator/installation.
Do write a Change Request to fix the kludgy nature of this in the immediate next release
