"You get a chance to play with the toys before anyone else does," said Martha McConaghy, an IT manager at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who said beta testing lets her return to her IT roots.

Instead of sitting in meetings and shuffling paperwork, McConaghy said becoming a beta tester for IBM has allowed her to dive into the guts of a system to fix bugs. "That's the roots of why you got involved [in] computers in the first place," she said.

McConaghy was a beta tester for IBM's z/VM 5.2 release, a virtualization software upgrade that early adopters started running about a year ago -- about six months before it was generally available. McConaghy was at the Share conference for IBM users in Baltimore to talk about what she learned from her implementation.

Before IBM puts a product into general release, it works with beta testers in its Early Support Program (ESP). The program is "very important -- we use the program to not only discover bugs and fix them before general availability, but we use these programs to understand the performance and usability characteristics of the operating system in real customer environments," said Chuck Morse, an IT specialist at IBM who works with the ESP program.

One of the program's goals is to put the software in a range of IT user environments to see how it will behave with different applications and users. For those users who agree to try the beta code, there's an increased chance that something could go wrong.