Drush Make is certainly quite useful for building Drupal code-bases. A little-known capability is to load project version data from a source other than the official http://updates.drupal.org. This install profile is intended to make it easy to run your own updates service.

We use a simple Vagrant-based VM that installs Drush and a Drupal site. It symlinks this project as an install profile, so that simply editing the code in this directory is sufficient to see the changes.

$ git clone https://github.com/ergonlogic/make-server.git
$ cd make-server
$ vagrant up

If you want to install Drush from sources, instead of the .phar:

$ DRUSH_DEV=true vagrant up