Development Tag providers

We currently have several large tag providers and a perspective 'development' gateway.
An issue we have run into is that any changes to the tag providers are immediate but changes to the perspective app are only applied once deployed.

This can result in breaking the production application and restricts us from being able to refactor our tag architecture without a significant break in production. I would like to configure a development tag provider for my project so that we can
A) Modifications to the development tag provider wont immediately impact production
B) Be able to stage significant tag architecture update's along with perspective updates to roll out all at once

I'm not entirely sure how this would be accomplished but any insight would be appreciated

B) is what you get with gateway-centric git-based deployment. The hitch is that your dev gateway(s) needs simulated devices and replacement/isolated DB connections.