Best way to organize a development environment for Bamboo Java Specs

[james_mckean]

I have a client new to the Atlassian family.  They jumped into a fairly complex Java Specs to manage a set of several hundred API endpoints. It is working fine, but any changes are being developed and applied directly in the production spec. 

Now that they are past the initial setup, they would like to create a good development environment.  I would like to know how others are doing it.  They use gitflow in app dev.

1. are you using non-master branches of the same repo for development or a whole different repo?  How are your prod and non-prod java spec scan repos configured?

2. when testing, do you build your non-production jobs on your production Bamboo box or a separate non-prod box?

3. have you automated any required changes in the non-prod code (like the URL of the bamboo server if you use a different one)?

If you know of a resource in the Atlassian documentation that helps with this, I would appreciate a reference.  I have come up empty.