I am still not sure what administrative rights your developers need.
Usually, a developer only needs administrative rights on their local
workstation. In this case their domain user account can be added to the
local Administrators group on that workstation.
If the developer needs administrative rights on a server because they
are developing on that server, they can be added to the local
administrators group on that server.
If for some reason they are developing directly on a DC, they should be
working on their own isolated active directory environment in a
separate forest from your production environment. You can give them
administrative access to the local box by adding them to the domain
group "Administrators", which is effectively the local administrators
group for all DCs in the domain. However they wouldn't have
administrative access to the domain, which they probably need if
they're developing something that runs on a DC. Go ahead and put them
in the domain admins group, since they are in an isolated active
directory forest and can't hurt your production forest. But if they're
in an isolated forest, you shouldn't be worried about preventing them
from running any apps - which brings me back to the whole question of
why you need to do this in the first place?
The software restriction group policy, if you need it, should be
created from Group Policy Management Console and linked to an
Organization Unit that only contains the computer accounts (or user
accounts) you wish it to apply to.