Fear and Loathing my next Fedora update

[TGS]

The other day I was happily singing the praises of Fedora. Everything, at
least everything that I use, seems to work just fine.

At least that was until I updated Yum, and was hosed. No biggie, since I was
only updating Yum, and easily was able to backdate to the previous version.
Then I said to myself, hmmm, maybe I should not be soooo cutting edge,
getting every fix that is released. So I sat back and waited.

Then I have was shocked to see the file corruption issue be introduced to
the baseline at this late date, after 540+ builds.

So my question is this ...

Are the releases, patches, fixes, additions, and updates being tested
properly before they are put into the tree, or are the developers releasing
code that is semi-stable at best, with the hope that the user
developer/community with be the initial test bed?