Debug video addond

[pacmyc]

Hi. Im using a video plugin called svtplay (https://github.com/linqcan/xbmc-svtplay) on my raspberry with xbian. Its a plugin to stream videos. Quite often the provider makes updates to their sait which makes the plugin not work. Instead of waiting for the developers to update the plugin I'd like to understand the code myself (as it's a python open soruce plugin) and be able to make the necessary modifications to the code myself. So I am wondering if there are any guides or faq on how to get started programming XBMC-plugins and also how to
debug them on a running xbian system? Any hints would be appriciated, and in best case I might be able to contribute myself to this wonderful platform