In the past couple of days I was reworking my mediawiki dev setup, and I think it might be useful to the script runners/writers as well - an auto-configured (vagrant) linux virtualbox without gui and with all dev files residing on the host.
All dev files reside on the host and are simply mapped as a /srv/... dir in the client, all editing can easily be done on the host using whatever linux/windows/... tools users prefer. WinPdb sounds like a good remote debugging solution. Because it is possible to auto-configure the virtual box, we can set it up to have git, gerrit, unit testing, and all other tools needed for communal work. The box already includes a basic mediawiki installation, so devs can try out their new scripts on it.
Also, very importantly, we can have very simple instrtuctions because everyone's environment would be identical.
"vagrant up" ssh to the machine run script or git pull or git-review or browse to localhost:8080 or ...
My notes on the (work in progress) process are here. Most things that I found there will be moved to the auto-settings files. I am working with the settings' author on that. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Yurik/Installing_Linux_virtual_box_under_...