From the
Flight article mentioned above:
He says the build-up in outstanding work resulted from the policy last year to ship subassemblies to Toulouse incomplete, rather than hold them back and cause a bottleneck. "As each milestone in the build process was reached, if the required work had not been finished then the assemblies were delivered to the final assembly line uncompleted to avoid slowing the production rate," he says.
That is standard practice for any company these days. They always want to show that they are on target, even if they are not. It is unfortunate that investors and managers no longer have the confidence to make the customer wait until it is ready. This is one of the main downsides to strong competition. A simple alternative example of this problem is Microsoft, who have made it (almost) part of the development process to release software very early and get the customer to do much of the testing, hence the stricture never to buy the first release of anything.
The problem of photographs being aired out of context is a singularly modern one. People know that money is to be made from these photographs and the explanation is always running behind. This is most unfortuante and - in this instance - Airbus have my sympathy. For having shipped assemblies that are not yet complete, they do not.