We have witnessed some of the issues on the HF20 release. Now in teh perfect software world we will have Development Environment where all the developers code will go for the first round of testing, then we have the Stage Environment where the date will replicate as that of Prod but the code is of development to check if the new release will function properly in the live environment. Then comes Prod when everything is working perfectly fine in Stage, we deploy to prod.
Now this cycle should be repeated for every releases whether the release is a small or a big one. Now HF20 was a big release and might be it was tested also, the only thing makes me wonder is that how come such thing gone unnoticed in the release. If the testing did not happen properly or the testing is not done on the prod data. Whatever is the case but HF20 release was not smooth and people involved should take care of it from the next time.