Security Basics: Admin rights via backdoors

[WALI <hkhasgiwale () gmail com>]

Hi Guys

I do understand the risks of seeing open ports on servers using nmap/nessus 
but need to demonstrate a concept to my managers, the need for segregating 
software developers and production environments, especially pertaining to 
an financial application being built in-house.
I maintain that getting admin rights into an application while bypassing 
logical access controls flowing down from Active directory or OS level is 
trivial for a programmer if he hard codes some backdoor entry ports replete 
with usernames and passwords. They disagree that if they have no AD rights 
granted on the resource (different AD domains / filers etc), there is no 
reason to physically isolate developers from production.
Is my contention conceptually correct? How can I demonstrate this with a 
dummy application?