This is the process I followed on my Fedora 23 host machine to build a small/minimal vanilla Linux kernel and test in Qemu (based on this blog post). This will provide a safe sandbox in which to test kernel changes, and is generally faster than developing natively on the host machine. Qemu will boot the kernel image directly in the emulated system.
sudo dnf install ncurses-devel kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc gcc-c++ git qemu openssl-devel glibc-static