This is a description of a fairly typical website replacement. The details may and may not apply to the southern one:
People do think of testing before putting things live, but then the project starts running a couple of months late, because it was physically impossible to do it in the original timescales, but nobody actually bothered to plan it properly. Some bright spark will suggest getting it "back on track" by squeezing the testing window. Eventually the later stages of development are squeezed as well, and some features are cut, but they are the ones that haven't been done yet rather than the unimportant ones. The remaining incomplete features - the most important ones that even marketing accept you can't launch without - are then hacked together in about a quarter of the time required, and released with no testing at all.
The original plan actually called for a couple of releases and a beta phase, with a staged switchover which allowed for rollback when things went wrong. Unfortunately the subscription for the old ticket sales service was up for renewal, and it seemed a shame to waste a couple of hundred quid renewing it. Besides there was some planned marketing spend to publicise it, and nobody really felt like making a phone call to put that off by two weeks. It was felt by the stakeholders in the business that since they didn't understand the risks of a big-bang release, they were probably not all that significant, and a decision was made well beyond the pay grade of anybody in the development or IT team to just all pull together and really go for it. In a unified spirit of team, they finally pressed the big red and pressed go, steeling themselves as they did for the 80 hour weeks they were going to have to spend over the next month or two on basic triage and getting features live that turned out to be vital after all.
