What we know for sure based on the confirmation that selling and rebuying a refinery fixes the issue with limpets is that testing has clearly been done, but the test scripts in this specific example have been oversimplified and not taken certain key scenarios into consideration (or not run at all). That suggests of lack of expertise, lack of resource, or both.
It tells me that they
really need a beta test phase. It sounds like they had plenty of testers but they were all working with ships built under the new system. Something, probably in the database, changed and some things in the old ships are not quite compatible. It's difficult to test that scenario. Sooner or later all the old stuff is gone from all your accounts and only the new stuff is left. It's possible to avoid that if you are very careful and have a good test regimen in place such as having snapshots of the accounts that you regularly restore.
There are certain tests that you would always do. That includes both varieties of mining, combat, exploration and engineering. It is not believable that any of that was forgotten. What is believable is that it wasn't tested with ship builds from before the update. That code has been under test for months; it will have contaminated every test account as they found bugs and retested to verify they had been fixed. The developers' machines will have been contaminated even faster.
I can believe that some of these problems did not manifest before the update went live. That includes the problems with the store. Those might be issues with the merchant account or incompatibilities with the live servers or the network infrastructure. These sorts of things happen. Within the game itself there are only a small number of very minor bugs that got through the net but they have such a major effect on game-play that they should never have been let through. If Frontier knew that those bugs were there, then they would have aborted the release. So they didn't know they were there, and that is proof, whatever the fault was, that their testing process is not fit for purpose. When all the panic dies down someone should be facing some difficult truths and asking how they can fix the testing issue. This is nobody's fault, nobody is guilty of gross negligence, nobody needs to be fired, but Frontier as an entity has lessons to learn and it needs to learn them and make sure that this does not happen the next time.
I don't know what the fault was here. It smells to me like they were not using account snapshots but, if they
are already doing that, then something else obviously went wrong. And alongside that is beta testing. You don't need a long beta phase -- beta testers are more susceptible to contamination from the new build -- but it can find bugs that no amount of in-house testing will detect. It doesn't need to be public; most players on a public beta probably do not submit bug reports or work to find bugs. It can be under a strict NDA that forbids any communication about the new features, bugs or game-play.
