No .. you do need two installs (via changing the install path in the game launcher) to play release and Dev Versions.
other than that there isnt a problem with having more than one game version around.
the official testserver runs the latest dev builds (that is if someone had time to update, normally within an hour or so)
and you can join there anytime you like (authentication with registry required nothing else) play.star-made.org:4242
so you could test new stuff, or see if a specific problem is already fixed that is in release, or find out about new features in development
(if there are any to really try, first iterations of new things are very unstable normally)