Skyrim - Interview @ Kotaku

Todd Howard also talked to Kotaku during PAX and he told them about Bethesda's bug squashing plans:

With Skyrim, Bethesda will adopt a special direct connection to their game—on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360—that will let them update the game on the fly, similarly to how EA is able to tweak the rosters of their sports games without going through the standard multi-day or multi-week waits to update most games on consoles. They are also running new and better processes to catch bugs before the game launches.

Before launch, Howard said, Bethesda is testing Skyrim rigorously and more heavily using a system that runs automated versions of the game overnight, searching for bugs and helping the team squash them. "We're getting better at it," Howard said.

They are also adopting this new EA Sports-style "live update" system that will let Bethesda tweak the data in their game almost immediately. If a quest isn't triggering because players are doing some unforeseen combination of actions, that might be addressable by tweaking the data tables that dictate the flow of events in the game.