How to create development/test environment of TB reporting database in SQL Server

I am working on a couple large reporting databases with lots of reporting and analytical queries and many ETL jobs. When I make changes I usually do in in production, be that changes in indexing or the code. Just had a minor accident after changing some code so I am thinking to start creating a development/test environment. But the databases are huge with some huge tables. The databases are located on a huge server with lots of CPU cores and memory. How can I make a light test environment on my own computer in a developer edition? Another option would be to create a test environment on the production server which is a data warehouse server (i.e. there are lots of ad hoc queries anyway). Is this a better approach? I would just have to restore a backup and name the database something else... There are many dependencies in the databases, so scripting out all the objects manually is too much work. E.g. some stored procedures use around 100 tables... So my question is: how can I stop making all my changes directly in production? Thanks