uvtool (uvt-kvm) provides the ability to easily launch an ubuntu guest of kvm.
This can be used for testing curtin from bzr or from the Ubuntu archive.
For more information on getting started with uvtool, see Ubuntu doc. Once that is set up you can follow along here.
Note that much of this document is not uvt-kvm specific. That is just used as an easy way to get an Ubuntu vm with a spare disk. You could just as easily do this on a cloud instance (OpenStack, Azure, DigitalOcean).