Plugin development - How do you get a license for your own yet to be released plugin for development environment?

Struggling a bit since the only way I know now is to removed the

<product-descriptor … />

from the plugin.xml but that is also very risk if I am to keep doing that in the future … or maybe i just need to do it until i upload the plugin the first time ?

Is there a good way to circumvent this in sandbox environent?

Not using gradle!

I personally generated coupons for free licenses for my plugins. I use them in my dev environment. Do this from your plugin page / sales / coupons.
In practice, when running an IDE in sandboxed mode, I register my license once, and I’m good for the next times. Also, I don’t clear the sandboxed IDE’s config dir, otherwise I’ll have to register my license again.

I can’t say for integration tests.