Not quite. They programmed their "prod" software to recognise the circumstances of a laboratory test and behave differently. Namely during laboratory emissions testing they would activate emission control features they would not activate otherwise.
The software was the same they flash on production cars. They were production cars. You could take a random car from a random dealership and it would have done the same trickery in the lab.
“Production” is a factory line producing cars. The software is uploaded on the ECUs by some factory machine automatically. Each car are exactly the same, with the exact same software version on thousands and thousands of cars. The cars are sold to customers.
Some small number of these prodiction cars are sent for regulatory compliance checks to third parties. But those cars won’t become suddenly non-production cars just because someone sticks up a probe in their exhausts. The same way gmail’s production servers don’t suddenly turn into test environments just because a user opens the network tab in their browser’s dev tool to see what kind of requests fly on the wire.