I do a very similar process. You don't need the same versions, it will actually be very different no matter how you look at it. Cloudant is very cool, and have made a lot of alterations and additions to their system. So, if you are looking at developing views, attachments, etc, then you can develop those locally on your dev project. Once your dev project looks good, I would have those checked into the staging/qa server, which I like to use Cloudant for as well. Thats where you need to get everyones code working together. after that is done, you can fire off a replicator to replicate your staging to production.
No matter how you look at it though, or how you envision the process being, you are going to want to take a close look at the going from dev to QA. There are ways to go about it so that everyone can dev on their own, and merge up. I personally like to use github. I hope this helps you out in your tasks.