I wouldn't say it's easy to produce a installable .deb file if you want to take quick test of something. You basically have to options; a) set up a SDK enviroment and build debs there, or b) create a garage account and upload sources to autobuilder and wait for it to build the package and then download it to your phone...

Other than that, theme making is pretty easy atm.

Maybe someday MADDE will include all necessary things for building the package when using stskeeps's theme template.